JOIN is the preferred method for specifying the join condition. WHERE is used to filter the data before it's joined. All the SQL gurus I know use JOIN

Craig, while I don't disagree with you - some of my students are former Oracle developers (and some pretty good ones) who use WHERE, and never even considered using JOIN.

I also know a fairly well known developer and SQL author (who shall be nameless) who, up until a year ago, always used WHERE over JOIN (but has since "come around")