Sams Teach Yourself SQL in 10 Minutes (2nd Edition)

Rating:
Summary: Concise and practical
Review: This is an excellent book for biginners. It is very well written with a good sense of humor. The author's experience is reflected well. The book helped me understand SQL.

Rating:
Summary: Concise Introduction to SQL
Review: This book is a well-written, well-organized, concise introduction to SQL. Each of the 22 lessons takes about 10 minutes to complete. The same files are used throughout and are available from the author's Web site. Using these files and the author's numerous examples, one can learn SQL step-by-step as painlessly as possible.

There is one deficiency, though. Appendix E lists all SQL Reserved Words, but doesn't provide the exact syntax to use (for different DBMS's) or examples. Correcting this would subtantially increase the size of the book but would be extremely useful for reference.

Rating:
Summary: Well written and a great reference
Review: I've been programming professionally for 20 years, and until now never really had any need for a database. Over the years I've created many simple to moderately complex Access databases for my own use, but never for commercial or industrial use.

I bought this book to "flesh out" my understanding of the building blocks of SQL. To that end, this book has done an outstanding job. The chapters build upon each other in a logically sequential manner, and the information presented is both necessary and sufficient to illustrate the topic effectively.

This is not an advanced book, but it provides a solid understanding of SQL. I'm giving it 4-stars because I now write Oracle and SQL Server databases for commercial and industrial use, and I find myself still using it as a primary reference.

Rating:
Summary: A good book
Review: Ben Forta's SQL in 10 Minutes is a concise, easy-to-understand book. I'm going to keep it handy as a reference/teaching tool for use with friends and co-workers. I am pleasantly surprised that such a small book covers SQL so well.

Rating:
Summary: Quick and Painless and Easy
Review: My copy of this book is hopelessly dog-eared and marked with notes. It's gotten the most use out of all my computer books. It teaches the basics of SQL in an easy manner and then is useful as a reference thereafter. It's cheap too. It's bare-bones but hits all the essentials.

Rating:
Summary: An excellent learning/reference tool for the SQL beginner!
Review: This little book is straightforward and well organized. It covers all of the major DBMS platforms, like Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Access, MySQL, and Oracle. Each of the 22 lessons (chapters) take about 10 minutes to complete -- hence the title, "Teach Yourself SQL in 10 Minutes". There are also appendixes that provide sample scripts, platform information, definitions, etc.

This little book is a fine substitute if you don't have the time or funds to attend a SQL training course.

Rating:
Summary: Good Succinct Primer on SQL
Review: I taught a class to co-workers who had no SQL experience using this book, covering the first 6 chapters in approximately 4 hours; and the next day they were able to assist in writing queries, easing my workload (this is an excellent book to use for learning how to write queries, but it does not cover design, for that see Steven Roman's Access Database Design and Programming). This book demands a careful reading as it explains the syntactical differences between different implementations of SQL (e.g., Access uses * and ? as wildcards as opposed to % and _).

Rating:
Summary: Good book to learn the Basics.
Review: This book is what it says it is. Very good book on how to learn SQL basics!! When you have completed this book, you will be able to do most of the queries that you need for your job. It is not written to teach you the complex parts of SQL, but it does touch these. I recommend this book to anyone that needs to learn SQL for reports or programming.