This book walks you through your first steps in T-SQL (also known as Transact-SQL), which is Microsoft SQL Server s dialect of the standard ANSI-SQL language. You ll learn the theory behind T-SQL querying and programming, how to develop T-SQL code to query and modify data, and get an overview of programmable objects. Although this book is intended for beginners, it is not merely a step-by-step book. It goes beyond the syntactical elements of T-SQL and explains the logic behind the language and its elements. Many aspects of SQL are unique to the language, and are very different from other programming languages. This book helps you adopt the right state of mind and gain a true understanding of the language elements. You learn how to think in terms of sets and follow good SQL programming practices. The book is not version-specific; it does, however, cover language elements that were introduced in recent versions of SQL Server, including SQL Server 2008. To complement the learning experience, the book provides exercises that enable you to practice what you ve learned. The book starts with a theoretical background to T-SQL querying and programming (Chapter 1) laying the foundations for the rest of the book, and also coverage of creating tables and defining data integrity. The book moves on to various aspects of querying and modifying data (Chapters 2 through 8), then to a discussion of concurrency and transactions (Chapter 9), and finally provides an overview of programmable objects (Chapter 10). This book features a companion Web site that makes available to you all the code used in the book, the errata, additional resources, and more.