Preface

This is a simple course that teaches you the basics of SQL. You'll learn the core commands and syntax for creating, reading, updating, and deleting data. Along with the book there is a small set of videos that demonstrate the exercises and so you can see how these commands work in real life. I find this combination of text with videos helps people retain the information better than with simply text or videos alone.

The best way to work through this book is to do the following:

• Read an exercise and take notes about the contents.

• Attempt to do the exercise yourself, solving any problems you possibly can on your own.

• Watch the video for additional clues and information.

• Write down any questions you have or problems you faced before moving on to the next exercise.

This is fundamentally the way all of my books work. They're designed so that you learn how to solve problems on your own using reasoning and debugging skills. By learning the core concepts through rote practice and then applying them to creative problems you will learn quicker.

This book also takes things slow. You aren't given a huge wall of text full of jargon and then expected to type a few lines of code to understand the concepts. Instead you are given a small amount of code, a discussion of the code, and then a demonstration of the concepts when you're ready to understand them. If you're the kind of person who need to understand large conceptual structures full of mathematical proofs before you feel you can write single line of code then my books are not for you.

Finally, this book won't make you a grand master SQL database administrator or data modeling expert. There's a vast trove of books that already teach these concepts. This book is just enough knowledge to get started with those other books. At the end of this book I'll give you a list of these other books so you can continue your studies of SQL and data modeling in general.

If you run into problems please feel free to email me at help@learncodethehardway.org any time.