Customer Reviews

SQL Queries for Mere Mortals®: A Hands-On Guide to Data Manipulation in SQL (2nd Edition)

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

It's easy to find a good book that will provide definitions and examples for inner joins vs. outer joins, subqueries, etc. You can read them and understand the definitions and/or examples, however, when you come across a 10 - 20 line query in your job or have to create your own complicated query from scratch you realize just how tenuous your gut-level understanding of this mysterious thing called SQL really is.
This book will give you the gut-level understanding you so desperately crave - and need if you are working with databases.
The authors provide clear explanations of the various SQL constructs for both the SQL Standard and real world levels (which are oftentimes two different things). They further deconstruct real-world issues by also describing the anomalies between some of the more popular databases.
But you can get all this from just about any other good SQL book. Where this one really shines is the way it leads you from simple to more and more complex queries via well-crafted and well-explained examples. They progress from simple queries to queries containing expressions to filtering data with a 'where' clause to inner joins to outer joins to unions to subqueries to aggregate functions to grouping data and then filtering that data by 'having' clauses. They end up by covering updating, inserting, and deleting data.
They give tons of examples that illustrate how to solve common problems and the more trickier "gotchas" that you're likely to run into. These examples occur both within the meat of the chapter, i.e. where they are explaining terms and concepts, and at the end of the chapter where they describe how and why they put the queries together the way they did.
The queries are all against 5 databases containing from 6 to 13 tables each. The databases, tables, and all of the queries are contained on a CD ROM that accompanies the book.
Each chapter ends with 3 or 4 problems for *each* of the 5 databases. If you really want to learn how to write complex queries then do as many of the problems as you can. The solutions are on the CD so if you get stuck you can see how the authors solved the problem. The more you do, the more you will find that you can craft fairly complex SQL queries "from the hip". As one who did all of the sample problems I can assure you that that statement is no lie.
I cannot recommend this book enough.

This book is terrific for database newbies, such as myself, who need to get up to speed on SQL as quickly as possible. But, please be aware of one MAJOR flaw if you are a (insert shudder here) Windows Vista user:

The book includes a CD, advertised as usable on either a Windows or a Mac system, for all of the sample databases and queries referenced in the text. On the Mac side, the files will load effortlessly (natch) -- but, if you are using Windows Vista, your system won't even see the Windows partition on the disk. Strangely, it will see the Mac files, but of course, you can't use them. If you are using Windows XP, however, the files show up just fine. Turns out that the CD is formatted as HTF, and Vista will not read those files. The files are not available online for download (at least as of this writing), so forewarned is forearmed.

This is a great book especially for a beginner starting to do SQL queries. The examples in the book are clear and easy to follow and it's nice there's a CD which has good examples also. The book also describes inner and outer joins and grouping data. This book has helped me in my work.

I took a new job where I needed to write SQL queries, and I had never done that before. No problem, I ordered this (and a couple other) book(s) and in essentially one afternoon I was able to write the queries that I needed to write, and understand how they worked. This book was the one that I used most in learning this stuff, so it gets a big recommendation from me.

This book takes you step-by-step in creating SQL queries. First simply using a "select" clause, then "from", then "order by" and so forth until you are learning how to put together some pretty complicated queries. I definitely felt like this taught me all I needed to know to get started. The book his some nice diagrams that show how the different clauses are put together, which I also found very helpful.

The only criticism that I have for this book, and I dock it 1-star for this, is that the book contains quite a bit of stuff that I consider useless, and just makes it a little more time consuming to wade through it than it really needs to be. For example, if you are reading the book sequentially, you must first read through chapters on this history of sql (yawn) and database design (useful, but seemingly out of place in this book) before you get into the "meat" of the book. Then once you get into the queries sections, it seems to give you a lot of examples which are basically identical to one another (in other words, redundant and unnecessary).

These are relatively minor complaints though, and it is a very useful and effective book.

We used this book in our college course, and our professor is changing books next semester because this book is littered with examples that do NOT work. The examples in the book didn't work and the examples on the CD also did not work.

The examples didn't work 95% of the time because there were spelling mistakes in the table names or field names, or the author linked the wrong columns. He would say "This example shows how to do this..." and the example would do something completely different then the descritpion said it was going to do.

If your new to programming, this is going to do nothing but confuse you. I thought it was a decent book, until we got further into it and realized that there are on average 3 examples that do not even execute in each chapter after about chapter 7.

Also, on pages 601 (I think, there abouts) there is a complete schema of every sample database provided. Even those schemas are incorrect. They don't correctly reflect the databases, mostly because of spelling mistakes in the table names, and field names.

My professor is not very happy that he chose to use this book for our class.

I was in the process of teaching myself SQL. At first I went on the tutorial on the mysql website, which was good, but the examples were very small. You could cut & paste data from the web page into a file and then LOAD DATA LOCAL ... the data into a table, but the data wasn't quite formatted right and you had to massage it. And all the examples were pretty small, and the tutorial ran through the material pretty quickly.

I went to a bookstore and paid $65 for this book, (I could have gotten it from Amazon a lot cheaper than that, but I was in a hurry). I feel it was a good investment. The CD-Rom contains several example databases, and they're pretty big and complex. Another reviewer pointed out that getting the files off the CD isn't always easy. My mysql installation is on linux, and I couldn't see the files on the CD, but I also have an XP box, and was able to download the files there and transfer them over to my Linux box.

The text always refers to the databases on the CD rom, and it has a LOT of examples, so you can try any of the given examples and modify your query to see what else happens. Each chapter has many examples in the text, but at least a dozen further examples at the end of each chapter. What's more, there are solutions to the examples on the CD Rom. Having large, complex databases to work with interactively was great, as was having a lot of examples.

The pace of the text is slow, which is fine, if you feel you understand what they're saying you can skim forward. In the examples in the text, they use pretty verbose SQL -- they tell you, for example, what a natural join is, and what "using" means, but after that they never use these techniques in subsequent examples, though it would shorten the solutions a bit. They also quality column names with 'table.columnName' when 'columnName' would have sufficed, and they put in a lot of unnecessary parens. I think this is deliberate, they want to teach you "good habits" and make everything redundantly clear.

They don't cater to one particular dialect of SQL. I was using mysql, and there were a couple of things: concatenating strings with || or +, and full outer joins, that aren't supported by mysql and the text didn't explain this, but I also had a mysql manual lying around that explained these things.

I really enjoyed this book and the return to the fundamentals that this book provides.

I got this book to help with certification. I didn't realize how much I didn't know until I got this book. It improved my coding exponentially. It is easy and builds on what you have learned chapter by chapter. There are practice questions at the end of each chapter and a CD that provides all of the sample databases in the most popular formats (SQL Server, Access and Mysql and Oracle). There's hours and hours of review questions to practice on. This book is great and will be a reference I use for years to come. Not for experts, but everyone else can benefit.

I read this book from cover to cover as an extra resource for my Databases class at the Art Institute and I will say this... If you want to learn SQL, get this book! I was turned on to this book after I read Databases for Mere Mortals by the same author.

The feeling I got while reading Hernandez's books was that he really knew and loved what he was talking about. In this title, he explains SQL Queries in a super logical and organized format, there is NO WAY, you won't understand it! The title of the book, "For Mere Mortals" is absolutely dead on. I had zero experience with Databases and SQL and after reading both, I can communicate with my colleagues and they entrust me with tasks accordingly.

Even if you already have an understanding of SQL queries, you will come to respect and even adopt the framework that Hernandez presents because it clearly and visually illustrates the entire playing field in a way that leaves no rock unturned.

Highly recommend this book.

Namaste,
Dey

This book comes with a dvd. If downloaded for Kindle app on a computer, can the cd also be downloaded?