As it's obvious from the title, the book lists new improvements for programmers, not what become available to database administrators. It doesn't cover a lot of enhancements to enterprise data management in the following areas: high availability technologies, additional backup and restore capabilities, and replication enhancements; scalability advancements such as table partitioning, snapshot isolation; database encryption, and an enhanced security model; new management tool suite.
Programmers will find what was added to SQL language: ranking functions like Row_Number, Rank, Dense_Rank, NTile; new data types; the specific use of WITH clause; SOME, ANY and ALL operators; EXCEPT and INTERSECT set operators; PIVOT to create a cross-tab table; exception handling by TRY...CATCH; and other additions to SQL. A big chapter is devoted to XML integration. You will also find a lot of information about Common Language Runtime (CLR) Integration, the ability to develop database objects using any .NET language.
Other object models and services are also covered: data transformation services, server management objects, native HTTP SOAP, notification services and reporting services. You will also find out about the SQL Server Service Broker, distributed asynchronous application framework for new levels of scalability.