Sams Teach Yourself SQL in 10 Minutes

This book was born out of necessity. I have been teaching and writing on SQL for a long time – but whenever I was asked to recommend a good book on SQL I found myself somewhat stuck. There are good SQL books out there, but most of them are oriented towards database administrators or developers working within a highly database and SQL-centric world. And as such, most of them are overkill – they tend to provide too much information instead of just what most of us need to know.

This book has a specific audience in mind and was designed to be very different from other offerings out there. Instead of being geared towards DBA’s, this book is designed for real-world developers who write in Visual Basic, C/C++, ColdFusion, ASP, Delphi, Java, and any other language. Instead of being designed for folks who’s occupation is data manipulation, this book is oriented towards users of other client applications, Word users who need to mail-merge against a back end database, report writer users needing to extract information from corporate data stores, and anyone who needs to manipulate and interact with databases, but for whom database manipulation is not a full-time job.

It does not start with database fundamentals, normalization, relational database design, referential integrity, and security infrastructures. Yes, these issues are covered, but that is not the emphasis or the positioning, Rather, the book starts with the SQL SELECT statement, and then adds filtering, sorting, and so on. Table creation, working with different datatypes, implementing constraints, using stored procedures and triggers, and more are all introduced clearly and methodically in small bite size chucks. The emphasis on getting stuff done, and getting it done quickly helping you be productive as quickly as possible in whatever tool or environment you use.

I hope you find that these objectives have been met, and I welcome your feedback. Enjoy.