Lately I have decided to put some more attention into SQL Server. Thus, I have kindly asked Apress.Com to provide me with some SQL books for review. The first one I have just finished reading was the book Beginning SQL Queries of Clare Churcher and thus it would be reviewed here. 🙂
My experience with SQL is what I would call advanced beginner – I can write any type of join queries and functions, but still there are plenty of things in the SQL world that are new to me. Thus, I liked the fact, to start reading once again from the start. And I really learned lots of new stuff. E.g., how to write self joins of tables without writing a JOIN. Something like this:
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1 2 3 |
SELECT m.LastName, c.LastName FROM Member m, Member c WHERE c.MemberID = m.Coach |
is equal to this:
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1 2 |
SELECT m.LastName, c.LastName FROM Member m INNER JOIN Member c ON m.Coach = c.MemberID |
And plenty of other interesting stuff, coming piece by piece. E.g. the book comes really in an easy and digestible way – before many of the queries, the author translates her way of thinking in order to built the query – e.g. something like this -> I’ll write out the names from row, where m comes from Member table, if there exists a row e in the Entry table where m.Member ID = e.MemberID. Furthermore, there is a whole chapter at the end of the book, showing a thinking algorithm, in order to face the challenge of building a query based on a problem.
Last but not least, the screenshots of the book are nice and well explained. E.g., in the place where we are studying about queries, there are useful screenshots from the tables to be queried with the possible coming results.
The code of the database is provided online for free. I have personally wrote about 90% of the queries in SQL 2016 Management Studio and they worked there. 🙂 Thus, I was happy, reading the book.
The verdict is without hesitation is full points – the book is easily digestible and once you read it you would obtain new knowledge, if you are a novice in DB.
