As with the author of this review, I really like the cookbook format. I've made heavy use of the MySQL cookbook, also from O'Reilly, by Paul DuBois. It is excelent, and just about everything that Simon P. Chappell says about the SQL Cookbook applies, except of course the focus on just MySQL. I'm glad to hear of the SQL cookbook because I'll be developing for postgresql as well as MySQL in the near future. Thanks.