Review by Billy Barron

"JDBC Database Access with Java: A Tutorial and Annotated Reference" by Hamilton, Cattell, and Fisher (Addison-Wesley; ISBN 0-201-30995-5) is the fourth or fifth JDBC book I've read. Out of these books, this one is the best tutorial by far for the JDBC novice. The reason is that it covers much more depth than any of the other tutorials I've seen.

However, the tutorial only covers the first 30% of the book. The remainder is largely a JDBC reference. Unfortunately, there is nothing standout about this section as a whole. It does have some standout moments like Table 21.7 which covers type mapping to different SQL databases.

The appendices appear to be geared towards driver writers, but in reality, they are wonderful sources of knowledge about what is wrong with some of the existing JDBC drivers.

In summary, this book is pretty good. I'd recommend it as the book for people wanting to learn JDBC. For a reference guide, I'd say that it doesn't stand out from the pack and should just be looked at along with the rest.