Practical SQL, 2nd Edition
Practical SQL is an approachable and fast-paced guide to SQL (Structured Query Language), the standard programming language for defining, organizing, and exploring data in relational databases. The book focuses on using SQL to find the story your data tells, with the popular open-source database PostgreSQL and the pgAdmin interface as its primary tools. You’ll first cover the fundamentals of databases and the SQL language, then build skills by analyzing data from the U.S. Census and other federal and state government agencies. With exercises and real-world examples in each chapter, this book will teach even those who have never programmed before all the tools necessary to build powerful databases and access information quickly and efficiently. You’ll learn how to: - Create databases and related tables using your own data - Define the right data types for your information - Aggregate, sort, and filter data to find patterns - Use basic math and advanced statistical functions - Identify errors in data and clean them up - Import and export data using delimited text files - Write queries for geographic information systems (GIS) - Create advanced queries and automate tasks Learning SQL doesn’t have to be dry and complicated. Practical SQL delivers clear examples with an easy-to-follow approach to teach you the tools you need to build and manage your own databases.
Stats for nerds
5recommend
7mentions
7people
2020–2026years
71% recommend29% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I thought Practical SQL was very good at explaining both the how and the why with practical real-world examples.
- I planned to follow both of these and implement what is necessary:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qiQR5rTSshw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7MNX_UD7vY&list=PLIhvC56v63...
For SQL, I love Digital Ocean for their docs. I bought the book Practical SQL as well (I LOVE No Starch Press books):
https://digitalocean.com/community/tutorial_series/how-to-us...
https://nostarch.com/practical-sql-2nd-edition
For Rust, I'm literally reading the std lib and all of the rust books.
Good luck.
- I found that it depends on where your interest lies. If you just want to learn practical SQL then I have historically found the Celko books (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Celko) as well as, more recently, the No Starch Press books (https://nostarch.com/practical-sql-2nd-edition) very well written. Everyone learns differently however. I have a colleague who really enjoyed the O’Reilly books specific to SQL from a data analytics perspective. (Apologies, no link for that)
You might frequently find the No Starch and O’Reilly books on Humble Bundle, (https://www.humblebundle.com/books?hmb_source=navbar) if that is available in your location.There’s often loads of overlap between bundles. I’m sure I’ve bought the python book about 5 times so far but I don’t mind as it’s great value.
If you want to learn about database theory, however, as well as the practicalities of SQL, then I found that most of the resources I used when I did this at uni were online. The book we used was the Connolly/Begg book (https://www.pearson.com/us/higher-education/program/Connolly...)
I don’t think this effectively answered the “why” of your question, however. My guess is that SQL is a very well established domain language and when it comes to data normalised across many tuples it’s the standard for manipulation.
I don’t think that dataset size is the primary reason to manipulate data via SQL; I think that the moment your programme starts to need more than a single flat file data source, you naturally start to think about normalisation, indexes etc for performance and sanity.
If I may, however: I am coming at this from the other way in that I am far more often manipulating CSV and excel data and would like some good resources in how to quickly load that in to a dataframe in pandas or similar vs using SQL. (If I’m responding to a thread hijack I may as well go all in and totally derail it)
- I've been looking on brushing up on my SQL lately and have been going through these resources.
- Practical SQL, No Starch Press. ($30)
https://nostarch.com/practicalSQL
- Use The Index Luke ($15)
https://use-the-index-luke.com/
- Database Systems Concepts & Design by Georgia Tech on Udacity (free)
https://www.udacity.com/course/database-systems-concepts-des...
I can easily pay the $100, I cannot easily find more time, especially when there are a bunch of other things I'm spending time on. At a lower price I would likely buy the book "just because".
- I like Practical SQL from No Starch Press: https://nostarch.com/practicalSQL
I didn't learn from the book myself, but I read it to evaluate it as a teaching tool for juniors and wound up recommending it.
- I started blogging about 12 years ago as a way to gain some visibility for my skills within my field, data journalism. One post I wrote, which simply explained how to set up Python on Windows 7, somehow got indexed very high in Google search results and ended up generating hundreds of thousands of page views. More interestingly, most of the comments on the post were very complimentary of my ability to simply explain the topic.
That got me thinking: Why not write a whole book about a tech topic I enjoy? So, I started doing that. It took about seven years, but the positive feedback from my blogging gave me inspiration.
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