Product Description

Sams Teach Yourself SQL in 10 Minutes, 2E is a tutorial-based book, organized into a series of easy-to-follow, 10-minute lessons. These well targeted lessons teach you in 10 minutes what some books take several hours or days to teach. Instead of dwelling of database theory and relational design, this book takes a very hands-on approach to solving the needs of the majority of SQL users who simply need to interact with data.

The reader of this book will learn how to:

• Retrieve and sort data
• Filter data using comparisons and wildcards
• Use the aggregate functions to analyze data
• Perform insert, update, and delete operations
• Join relational tables using inner, outer, and self joins
• Combine queries using unions
• Use views
• Create and use stored procedures, triggers, and other advanced database features

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #145281 in Books
• Published on: 2001-05-11
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

From the Back Cover

Sams Teach Yourself SQL in 10 Minutes, 2E is a tutorial-based book, organized into a series of easy-to-follow, 10-minute lessons. These well targeted lessons teach you in 10 minutes what some books take several hours or days to teach. Instead of dwelling of database theory and relational design, this book takes a very hands-on approach to solving the needs of the majority of SQL users who simply need to interact with data.

The reader of this book will learn how to:

• Retrieve and sort data
• Filter data using comparisons and wildcards
• Use the aggregate functions to analyze data
• Perform insert, update, and delete operations
• Join relational tables using inner, outer, and self joins
• Combine queries using unions
• Use views
• Create and use stored procedures, triggers, and other advanced database features

About the Author

Ben Forta is Allaire Corporation's product evangelist for the ColdFusion product line. Ben has over 15 years of experience in the computer industry, and spent 6 years as part of the development team responsible for creating OnTime, one of the most successful calendar and group-scheduling products, with over one million users worldwide. Ben is the author of the popular ColdFusion Web Application Construction Kit, and it's sequel Advanced ColdFusion 4 Application Development, as well as books on JSP (JavaServer Pages), WAP, and other technologies.

Customer Reviews

A great way to learn SQL from scratch
The author has deliberately set out to create a book that assumes the reader has never used SQL before. It starts at the beginning with very simple tasks and works through more complex SQL as the book progresses. This book is nicely separated into small chapters so you can learn small chunks of precise material, and then come back later to learn a bit more.

It is also possible to download a training database, which accompanies the book - so you can try out, step-by-step, everything you read in the book.

I particularly like how the author quotes observations you are likely to witness when doing the tasks, so you understand the exact purpose behind entering each key stroke.

If you want to learn SQL from scratch or just need a book to jog your memory - look no further.

Does exactly what it says on the tin
This book teaches exactly what it says it will. Reading some of the previous comments I see that some people expect to learn how to create a database, this book simply teaches how to "interact" with a pre existing database, and it does this very well.
The idea behind this book is to teach the reader how to build a simple SQL query.
If you want a book that teaches about creating databases, relationships, keys or normalization, then you would be a lot better off buying a book on Microsoft Access or Database Management.

Great for a start, but many will quickly outgrow it
If you need a painless introduction to SQL, this book is excellent. I now work in db administration and development, and this was my first SQL book ever. The explanations are clear, accurate, and try to cover the most popular DBMSs on the market (mainly SQL Server and Oracle), though the book doesn't usually mention which SQL statements are supported in Access and which ones aren't. This is understandable, but an irritating omission nonetheless. I also had to refer to other sources to get a clear explanation of joins; I found the book to be inadequate in this respect, but apart from that it is excellent.