Professional Microsoft SQL server 2008 programming
Robert Vieira
Wiley Pub
Professional Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Programming from Wrox is a well formatted programming reference book for medium to advanced SQL Developers. The chapters are laid out well with useful examples. Especially, I liked the chapters on XML Integration, Advanced Queries, Index structure and Transaction & Locks. I will suggest this book to anyone who is from other RDBMS background to get up and running with programming in SQL Server. However, I was looking for information in Service Broker in detail as this is one of the programming areas which scales SQL Server to different level. Chapters such as Replication, Performance Tuning, Data Warehousing and Reporting were not explained in great detail. However the book solves it's purpose to provide a general guideline on SQL Server 2008 programming. 

I will recommend this book for other SQL Server professionals who want to understand the new programming features in SQL Server 2008 and also keep this book as reference in their SQL Server library