Learn SQL in Three Days (With CD-ROM)

Rating:
Summary: Learn SQL basics quickly
Review: The back cover of the book says that "Learn SQL in Three Days" is "introductory" and "ideally suited for programmers who have some experience with relational database software, but no specific experience with SQL." You should take this description seriously. The author will, for example, use words such as "predicates" and "unary" without defining them. He expects that you come to this book with a background sufficient to understand such terms. (I'd forgotten what these mean, but I still found this book to be a useful introduction to SQL--I just looked up unfamiliar terms in a computer dictionary.)

Bear in mind that the book is an introduction to SQL: you won't find a "right outer join" explained in this text, nor will this book serve as a heavy-duty reference book for all your high-powered SQL questions. This book does not go into great detail about the design of database tables (e.g., don't expect a discussion of "a fully normalized data model.")

Given the narrow audience for whom this book was written, I believe it to be effective. I studied the book and then obtained a certification in ANSI SQL from Brainbench. However, I *studied* the book (I didn't merely *read*) it, and I tried the author's examples on my own, and modified them, and thought about them. It took me more than three 8-hour days to get through this book, and I still didn't find the Brainbench test to be easy.

The CD that comes with this book has a 60-day trial version of Centura SQLBase 7 and a sample database. Nice touch. This allows you to follow the examples in the book, and modify them, and experiment with SQL (and destroy things with no real harm done).

The book has the usual assortment of typos that slip into written works (for example, the author sometimes refers to a table by two different names, perhaps reflecting a name change during the process of writing the book).

I don't believe the author explained correlated queries very well, and I went to an Internet tutorial to understand them better.

A couple of important words of advice ("corrigenda", if you will): If you copy the file "pubssqlb.dbs" to your own hard drive, make sure to change the "read only" attribute of this file to "off." If you don't (at least, this was my experience), you'll see a cryptic error message when you attempt to connect to the pubssqlb database: "Attributes not compatible." Also, be aware that the data in the "type" column in the "titles" table has extra spaces added to the data (e.g., "business" is actually "business "). Therefore, where the author has a select statement such as this: SELECT AVG(price) FROM titles WHERE type='business', try this select statement instead: SELECT AVG(price) FROM titles WHERE type LIKE 'business%'.

Rating:
Summary: Learn SQL basics quickly
Review: The back cover of the book says that "Learn SQL in Three Days" is "introductory" and "ideally suited for programmers who have some experience with relational database software, but no specific experience with SQL." You should take this description seriously. The author will, for example, use words such as "predicates" and "unary" without defining them. He expects that you come to this book with a background sufficient to understand such terms. (I'd forgotten what these mean, but I still found this book to be a useful introduction to SQL--I just looked up unfamiliar terms in a computer dictionary.)

Bear in mind that the book is an introduction to SQL: you won't find a "right outer join" explained in this text, nor will this book serve as a heavy-duty reference book for all your high-powered SQL questions. This book does not go into great detail about the design of database tables (e.g., don't expect a discussion of "a fully normalized data model.")

Given the narrow audience for whom this book was written, I believe it to be effective. I studied the book and then obtained a certification in ANSI SQL from Brainbench. However, I *studied* the book (I didn't merely *read*) it, and I tried the author's examples on my own, and modified them, and thought about them. It took me more than three 8-hour days to get through this book, and I still didn't find the Brainbench test to be easy.

The CD that comes with this book has a 60-day trial version of Centura SQLBase 7 and a sample database. Nice touch. This allows you to follow the examples in the book, and modify them, and experiment with SQL (and destroy things with no real harm done).

The book has the usual assortment of typos that slip into written works (for example, the author sometimes refers to a table by two different names, perhaps reflecting a name change during the process of writing the book).

I don't believe the author explained correlated queries very well, and I went to an Internet tutorial to understand them better.

A couple of important words of advice ("corrigenda", if you will): If you copy the file "pubssqlb.dbs" to your own hard drive, make sure to change the "read only" attribute of this file to "off." If you don't (at least, this was my experience), you'll see a cryptic error message when you attempt to connect to the pubssqlb database: "Attributes not compatible." Also, be aware that the data in the "type" column in the "titles" table has extra spaces added to the data (e.g., "business" is actually "business <space> <space> <space> <space>"). Therefore, where the author has a select statement such as this: SELECT AVG(price) FROM titles WHERE type='business', try this select statement instead: SELECT AVG(price) FROM titles WHERE type LIKE 'business%'.