SQL for Mere Mortals: A Hands-on Guide to Data Manipulation in SQL Book

To those people accomplished in its use, Structured Query Language (SQL) is a highly capable, eminently flexible, even beautiful way of describing the data you want from a database, or the changes you want to make to a database. For the rest of us, though, SQL is a first-class nuisance that we do our best to avoid by relying on relatively user-friendly--but usually less powerful--tools. SQL Queries for Mere Mortals aims to bring SQL-phobics closer to the first camp by carefully tutoring them in what SQL can do.The authors recognise that SQL queries usually come about as a result of questions from human beings, and usefully spend a fair bit of time showing how to convert, for instance, "What cities do our customers live in?" into "Select city from the customers table" and finally "SELECT city FROM customers" in SQL. They call this the "translation and clean up" process, and it's a fine approach. They don't press it too far, though, and are equally adept at presenting straight explanations of SQL syntax elements in prose. They spend a lot of energy graphically diagramming aspects of SQL syntax in a format that requires some up-front study. A particular reader might prefer text capsules to this arrow-intensive format, but other learners may like the graphical syntax diagrams. --David WallRead More