Database System Concepts by Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan is now in its 6th edition and is one of the cornerstone texts of database education. It presents the fundamental concepts of database management in an intuitive manner, geared toward allowing students to begin working with databases as quickly as possible.The text is designed for a first course in databases at the junior/senior undergraduate level or the first year graduate level. It also contains additional material that can be used as supplements or as introductory material for an advanced course. Because the authors present concepts as intuitive descriptions, a familiarity with basic data structures, computer organization, and a high-level programming language are the only prerequisites. Important theoretical results are covered, but formal proofs are omitted. In place of proofs, figures and examples are used to suggest why a result is true.
Abraham Silberschatz is the Sidney J. Weinberg Professor & Chair of Computer Science at Yale University. Prior to joining Yale, he was the Vice President of the Information Sciences Research Center at Bell Laboratories. Prior to that, he held a chaired professorship in the Department of Computer Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin. Professor Silberschatz is an ACM Fellow and an IEEE Fellow. He received the 2002 IEEE Taylor L. Booth Education Award, the 1998 ACM Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award, and the 1997 ACM SIGMOD Contribution Award. In recognition of his outstanding level of innovation and technical excellence, he was awarded the Bell Laboratories President's Award for three different projects - the QTM Project (1998), the DataBlitz Project (1999), and the Netlnventory Project (2004). Professor Silberschatz' writings have appeared in numerous ACM and IEEE publications and other professional conferences and journals. He has also written Op-Ed articles for the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and the Hartford Courant, among others.