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My favorite book on writing T-SQL is Itzik Ben-Gan's Inside SQL Server T-SQL Querying. It teaches more than any other book. Another great book is T-SQL Recipes. The 2008 version was by Joseph Sack. The 2012 version is by a collection of authors. If you're looking at performance tuning queries, you might check out my book SQL Server Query Performance Tuning.

I know you are asking for books, but I wouldn't neglect articles and blogs. In a fast changing field they make excellent supplements to books (though not really replacements since a *good* book will have a cohesive organization and be certain to avoid missing background information, things that even high quality collections of articles and blogs tend to lack by their structural nature.) On that topic, I would look at [The Curse and Blessings of Dynamic Sql][1]. It isn't about stored procedures or functions per se, but it deals in detail with a topic that is very significant to a lot of stored procedures. Similarly [How to Share Data between Stored Procedures][2] is worth reading. [1]: http://www.sommarskog.se/dynamic_sql.html [2]: http://www.sommarskog.se/share_data.html

Thanks for the recs, guys. Can you also recommend anything that includes practice exercises to get hands on exposure?