>The best book I've seen is by the Osborne Group. They have a whole series of books. The one I would reccomend is the developers series one. It uses VB for all the examples, though. But it has a lot of good examples and it also covers some of the admin parts that a developer should know about.

And when you want to expand into the inner workings of the data engine and optimizer, Inside SQL Server 7.0 is a must have!

-Mike