46 of 48 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Beats "SQL for Dummies" Hands Down, March 4, 2006
Like everyone else, I'm pressed for time. It's all I can do to keep up with Java, let alone related incidental technologies such as SQL, JavaScript, HTML, Ant, etc. But as one reviewer pointed out: make no mistake, you need to know SQL. And if you don't (hell, even if you do), this is just a flat-out good book to have and read. I had previously purchased and read "SQL for Dummies", but threw that book out when I got this one. (To be honest, it wasn't just this book that made me toss the "Dummies" book; I never really liked it to begin with.)
I like the way "Learning SQL" is written. Sure, facts are presented, but the author does a masterful job of telling you how and why those facts exist. In addition, the conversational tone of the book proceeds along the path you'd expect from a real conversation: from the simpler to the more complex, in a logical and sensical path. (Okay, so most conversations don't fall into that category. But this book sure does, so do yourself a favor and buy it!)
Oh, and one more thing related to being pressed for time: it's not the technical-typical 700+ pages, it's just a few hundred.
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59 of 65 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Programmers, please read!, October 7, 2005
If you're writing any type of database driven code and you think that you don't need to understand SQL, read this book. You do need to understand it, and this book teaches it very well.
Man, I'm so tired of cleaning up bad SQL code. Code that makes hundreds of queries when one would suffice. Or tables that have no primary keys. Or code that never makes use of joins. SQL is not horrible. It's worth understanding and knowing how to write well.
This book is well written, well illustrated, and makes learning SQL as pain-free as it can be. Please, please, please, read this book.
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103 of 117 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
grammar-based approach can't get off the ground, August 28, 2006
It seems like most of the people writing reviews for this book already know databases to some degree. I didn't, so I'd like to share my experience.
This book takes an old-school, grammatical approach to the SQL language, grouping related commands into chapters, then explaining each, one by one.
This makes the first part of the book exhilarating. You go to the O'Reilly website and download a database to work on, and immediately you are querying, updating, etc, using the examples from the book. SQL at first seems refreshingly direct and powerful compared to the (OO) programming languages I know.
However, the 'a command followed by long verbal explanation" approach completely falls apart when the content goes even a little deeper. For me, the book took a nosedive at the first "Joins" chapter, and never recovered.
It was then I realized that I had not yet firmly grasped what a 'foreign key" was, so it was hard to get my head around the the idea of a join.
A simple graph would have helped at many points, but there are no graphs.
Nor are the code examples embedded in meaningful contexts or test cases. Indeed, the reasons for writing the code are almost in every case revealed AFTER the code is shown ("in that last query, the intent was..."), and the code is never commented, which makes it harder to understand and retain. And without any context, it is difficult to understand WHY to use one command over another. It seems like you can skin a cat a million ways in SQL--so why prefer one kind of filtering to another? Performance, readability, what?
I guess it sounds like I just wanted this book to be a 'Head First'-type book, and that's true. But even on its own terms, this book is frustrating. Its pure emphasis on the language somehow skips syntax, and the long verbal explanations are constantly seesawing away from themselves ("as we will see", "as we have seen").
I've finished the book and feel reasonably confident about using SQL now. So this book is serviceable...but unnecessarily painful, too.
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