A note on select *. In some db's, you can do subselects with select * that increase maintainability. You can get things like:

select
 drink.id, drink.name
from
 ( select * from beverage where type = ? ) drink
[download]

now mind you, it may not be as efficient as explicitly doign every single column, but if the sub query produces negligible data-size difference (in bytes) then you can definitely get away w/ it and have virtually no performance difference.

Granted, this query can be rewritten so that it doesn't use a subquery, but subqueries are a feature that is needed sometimes. This is just merely an example showing only the features of a subselect and select * :)