[Book Review]Learning SQL(3rd ed.) by Alan Beaulieu

TL; DR

• This is a nice book, especially either if you're a total beginner or someone who's been using SQL queries in ad-hoc manners
• Focus on the concept part; some parts are too specific for a certain SQL server(MySQL, Oracle, etc.) and may be outdated as of now

Why I read this book

As a person who's been using SQL sporadically and in ad-hoc manners, I always have thought my lack of full understanding about how SQL queries and those DB services work. I wanted to go through really basic and core concepts of SQL queries and databases.

This book, Learning SQL by Alan Beaulieu(3rd ed., O'Reilly Media, was one of books that satisfied my needs. This book starts from very beginning and covers some core concepts that are essential in real production environments. Hence I chose this book and now I am a bit more confident about writing SQL queries in my workplace.

Good Parts

I like this book since it starts from defining the concepts like "database", "table", "relational DB", and so on. Those who are enforced to do some query jobs would probably have very vague understanding about what those jargons mean. Moreover, it introduces many real-life essential concepts and techniques such as

• basic, intermediate queries including joining, grouping, set operations or subqueries
• some intermediate or advanced concepts such as transactions, indexes, views, metadata, or database sharding

Rather than reading a small piece of code from a stackoverflow page or a medium article, reading through this book will definitely solidify your knowledge about those concepts.

Soso Parts

Even if this book covers lots of SQL-related subjects, sometimes it dives too deep. For example, if you're going to use built-in functions, it's better to use official docs or ChatGPT to look up what you need. Also, some examples seem to be made to explain just a particular concept(like cross join that is hardly used in a real production environment).

I recommend skipping those parts that you feel too detailed or consuming too much time explaining example query results. Maybe you could revisit them for reference later.

Conclusion

I was satisfied with this book in general. But some parts are rather too detailed. And yet, this book is a great introduction to those database novices who have had not much chance to take any database courses in university.