Beginning SQL

Easy to understand and follow up with many examples. It is great for beginner and advanced SQL user. I use this for my community college in Beginning SQL course.

I really like this book. It is broken into two sections. Chapter 1-3 is a once-over-lightly overview of all the key concepts involved in SQL. The rest is a thorough and detailed guide to more advanced uses. The SQL is generic, though the book has specific exceptions for MySQL, Access, SQL Server and Oracle. These are mostly unobtrusive and can be skimmed easily. It is moderately useful to see what exceptions exist and why, even if you have no intention of using those DBMS's. Unlike books like SQL in a Nutshell, these references don't create constant interruptions in the reading flow. What I like most about this book is that each subject is given a complete discussion, with ERD, SQL commands, and example data. In most cases, there is more than one example of usage. Unlike the current book, the examples are uncomplicated and make sense out of context of previous chapters, for the most part. The database examples are more self-contained and real-world than the current book -- more like the classroom examples. This book devotes from 3-10 pages to what most books only give 1/2 page. The text flows well and is light and friendly, but doesn't have distracting anecdotes. At first glance, it is a lot of text, a lot of pages, and the paper is newsprint which seems intimidating, but it is a quick read. The data examples are humorous, which makes it a bit less dull. Even though the Wrox tagline is "Programmer to Programmer" this book is more accessible than any other programming text I've read. It really is Beginning SQL. My only complaint: no coverage of PostgreSQL. Two thumbs up, 5 stars, etc... I really like this book!

This is a good general introduction to using SQL to build a database, put some data into it and then to get it back out when you need to use it for something. The author says that all of the SQL examples have been tested using MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, IBM DB2, Microsoft Access, and Oracle 10g. That says that the SQL used in the examples has to be very general in nature and not take advantage of newer and more powerful commands that have come about since these programs were written (particularly Access which uses the Jet engine that's more or less compliant with SQL:89). This is not a bad approach, because while you might miss out on some of the nifty commands, your code will be compatiable with virtually any database that you are using. You will find comments in the book like when discussing the substring function he says "MS Access doesn't utilize the SUBSTRING() function. Instead, it employs the MID() function...." I don't know how he could have done it any differently without writing five different books. This is an excellent beginning book. Use it to get started and to understand the concepts behind the SQL language. Then you may want to get a higher level book on the particular database you are using.