There are a number of articles, webinars, and blogs online about how to read execution plans, but many of them seem to stop after the the minimum description of the simplest type of plan, so I thought I’d throw out a brief comment on a couple of the slightly more complicated things that are likely to appear fairly commonly because you sometimes find plans with very similar shapes but extremely different interpretation.
First: select with scalar subqueries in the select list (there’s no need to worry about what the table definitions look like):