As it sai's above 'cracking value for money'.I have the other 'Ace' book on 'programming' which I found very good & it reccommended this one, so I bought it & wasn't dissapointed. Its not a specfic book on one particular type of DBMS, but it does have very good introductry chapters on relational databases using Access 97 AS/400, & even Oracle (a pleasant surprise too me!).The Oracle chapters are quite substantial & worth the money alone, concertrating on Oracle 8i (so it's very recent as Oracle 9i is currently in vogue)there is also a good substantial chapter on writing SQL itself. Overall ideal for Students or people just starting to use realtional database's...good buy I thought!