Sams Teach Yourself SQL in 10 Minutes (Fourth Edition)

This book was born out of necessity. I had 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++ and Objective C, ColdFusion, ASP, .NET. Java, JSP, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, 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.

This is the one of the best selling SQL books ever, and is used by individuals, organizations, and as courseware by academic institutions the world over, including: Auburn University (Auburn, AL), Baylor University (Waco, TX), Boise State University (Boise, ID), Brown University (Providence, RI), Central Connecticut State University (New Britain, CT), Columbia College (Chicago, IL), Duke University (Durham, NC), Florida Gulf Coast University (Fort Myers, FL), Florida International University (Miami, FL), Fort Lewis College (Durango, CO), George Fox University (Newberg, OR), Harper College (Palatine, IL), Harvard University (Cambridge, MA), Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, MD), Louisiana Tech University (Ruston, LA), Manatee Community College (Bradenton, FL), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, MA), Mercy College (New York, NY), Miami University (Oxford, OH), Milwaukee School of Engineering (Milwaukee, WI), Montgomery College (Montgomery County, MD), Morgan State University (Baltimore, MD), North Dakota University System (Bismarck, ND), Open University (UK), Oregon Health & Science University (Portland, OR), Palm Beach Atlantic University (West Palm Beach, FL), Penn State University (University Park, PA), Purdue University (West Lafayette, IN), Portland State University (Portland, OR), Sam Houston State University (Huntsville, TX), Salve Regina University (Newport, RI), St. Mary’s University (San Antonio, TX), Texas A&M University (College Station, TX), The College of William & Mary (Williamsburg, VA), UCLA (Los Angeles, CA), UC Long Beach (Long Beach, CA), UC Santa Barbara (Santa Barbara, CA), University of Baltimore (Baltimore, MD), University of Connecticut (Storrs, CT), University of Denver (Denver, CO), University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (Champaign, IL), University of Massachusetts Boston (Boston, MA), University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, MI), University of New Hampshire (Durham, NH), University of Northern Iowa (Cedar Falls, IA), University of Tennessee Knoxville (Knoxville, TN), University of Wisconsin (Madison, WI), University of Washington (Seattle, WA), USC (Los Angeles, CA), Utah Valley University (Orem, UT), Vanderbilt University (Nashville, TN), Virginia Commonwealth University (Richmond, VA), Wayne State University (Detroit, MI), Western Washington University (Bellingham, WA), and many more.

This fourth edition provides additional examples and tips, adds coverage of several advanced topics, and content specific to Apache Open Office Base, IBM DB2, Microsoft Access, Microsoft SQL Server (including SQL Server Express), MariaDB, MySQL, Oracle (including Oracle Express), SQLite, and PostgreSQL.

In addition, this fourth edition is printed in color and features color coding in all example source code.

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