Joe Celkos SQL for Smarties: Advanced SQL Programming offers tips and techniques in advanced programming. This book is the fourth edition and it consists of 39 chapters, starting with a comparison between databases and file systems. It covers transactions and currency control, schema level objects, locating data and schema numbers, base tables, and auxiliary tables. Furthermore, procedural, semi-procedural, and declarative programming are explored in this book.

The book also presents the different normal forms in database normalization, including the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, elementary key, domain-key, and Boyce-Codd normal forms. It also offers practical hints for normalization and denormalization. The book discusses different data types, such as the numeric, temporal and character data types; the different predicates; and the simple and advanced SELECT statements. In addition, the book presents virtual tables, and it discusses data partitions in queries; grouping operations; simple aggregate functions; and descriptive statistics, matrices and graphs in SQL. The book concludes with a discussion about optimizing SQL. It will be of great value to SQL programmers.