Understanding the New SQL: A Complete Guide

Hey, if you want to learn SQL then you need to have this book. It's the SQL Guide to learning SQL, even being a beginner, but the book "SQL: 1999 - Understanding Relational Language Components" is the best choice, because is more complete, and the content include all "Understanding The New SQL" content. Good luck!

This is a very useful book, and every professional user of SQL should read it. The authors demonstrate a clear understanding of the subject matter, and their writing style, with good examples, down-to-earth explanations, and the occasional touch of humor, is simply enjoyable. A particularly helpful feature of this book, is that syntax is shown in easy-to-read railroad diagrams. It would have been helpful if the index was organized in such a way that one could immediately locate the railroad diagram for a given SQL statement. A separate list of railroad diagrams would also be nice. And although I consider heavy reliance on defaults to be bad programming practice, I would have appreciated it if just a quick look at a railroad diagram told me what defaults, if any, applied for the statement in question. Any author of books or articles must have his or her target audience in mind. For example, what may be an excellent article for a trade magazine, would almost certainly be rejected by a scientific journal. Thus, when judging this book one must keep in mind the perspective of its authors. If you are looking for an academic textbook with emphasis on scientific rigor, then this book will disappoint you. It is pretty obvious that is not what this book was meant to be. If, on the other hand, you want a practically oriented book that will help you do your job in a better way, then this is a great place to start.Having worked with databases and related technologies for 18 years, I have seen so many books where the number of pages outweigh the knowledge of their authors by a factor of 2 or more (and just in case there are any publishers out there listening; computer professionals are sick and tired of having to read through hundreds of pages of blah-blah-blah in order to find the information we are looking for). This book is different. It contains 394 pages of ordinary chapters, followed by 133 pages of appendices, and the signal-to-noise ratio in all these pages is excellent. If you are an application programer, a database administrator, or some other kind of database practitioner, and you are serious about your work, then there are some books I would consider more or less mandatory reading. This is one of them.