Learning SQL

Although a little dated in places, and clearly favoring MySQL, it covers the essentials for working with SQL. By building a database that is used throughout the book, it becomes easier to grasp the concepts by working with the same data throughout instead of wasting time trying to comprehend the schema before looking at the problem itself. Unless your business does a lot of data processing, the concepts learned here may be sufficient for doing real-world work.

On the whole I was very impressed with this book. It is, in my opinion, a very well paced tutorial introduction to working with SQL. In order to make examples that the reader can try out on their own computer and get the same results as the book, it is based throughout on MySQL (which is freely available), although it sticks as closely as possible to standard SQL and, where the common database managers (MySQL, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server, at any rate) diverge it provides notes about the differences and suggests references for further reading. Also, in order to avoid confusing the novice with details of too many different databases it uses a single database (for a bank) in all the examples. A copy of this database is available to show more download from the publisher's website, making it possible to try out all the examples and exercises in the book.

I have a few minor niggles. Firstly, there are a few places where the data in the version of the DB that I downloaded from the website seems to diverge from the version used in the book (most notably in the employee start dates), so a few of the queries don't produce the same results. Secondly, there are a few topics (such as user-defined variables) that get sneaked into some of the examples and exercise solutions without a proper explanation in the text (at least not one that I could find, having read the entire book fairly carefully and consulted the index). Thirdly, the book talks about MySQL 6.0 as the current version, while in February 2010 (some months after it was published) the most up-to-date version I could find was 5.5 - evidently 6.0 was pulled at the Alpha stage of development and has not yet been reintroduced (this is not a major problem, as everything covered in the book seems to work fine with MySQL 5). Finally, it's slightly Windows-centric as it does a couple of times refer to "your Windows box" and never mentions any other operating systems apart from a couple of references to mainframes. Fortunately I know my way round Linux well enough not to be phased by the lack of installation instructions for MySQL, but it could be an issue for less experienced users of non-Windows OSes. show less