| | |  | Certification Central | Home » » SQL Queries for Mere Mortals®: A Hands-On Guide to Data Manipulation in SQL (2nd Edition) | | | | | | | Description: | | Unless you are working at a very advanced level, this is the only SQL book you will ever need. The authors have taken the mystery out of complex queries and explained principles and techniques with such clarity that a "Mere Mortal" will indeed be empowered to perform the superhuman. Do not walk past this book!
--Graham Mandeno, Database Consultant SQL Queries for Mere Mortals provides a step-by-step, easy-to-read introduction to writing SQL queries. It includes hundreds of examples with detailed explanations. This book provides the tools you need to understand, modify, and create SQL queries
--Keith W. Hare, Convenor, ISO/IEC JTC1 SC32 WG3--the International SQL Standards Committee I learned SQL primarily from the first edition of this book, and I am pleased to see a second edition of this book so that others can continue to benefit from its organized presentation of the language. Starting from how to design your tables so that SQL can be effective (a common problem for database beginners), and then continuing through the various aspects of SQL construction and capabilities, the reader can become a moderate expert upon completing the book and its samples. Learning how to convert a question in English into a meaningful SQL statement will greatly facilitate your mastery of the language. Numerous examples from real life will help you visualize how to use SQL to answer the questions about the data in your database. Just one of the "watch out for this trap" items will save you more than the cost of the book when you avoid that problem when writing your queries. I highly recommend this book if you want to tap the full potential of your database.
--Kenneth D. Snell, Ph.D., Database Designer/Programmer I don't think they do this in public schools any more, and it is a shame, but do you remember in the seventh and eighth grades when you learned to diagram a sentence? Those of you who do may no longer remember how you did it, but all of you do write better sentences because of it. John Viescas and Mike Hernandez must have remembered because they take everyday English queries and literally translate them into SQL. This is an important book for all database designers. It takes the complexity of mathematical Set Theory and of First Order Predicate Logic, as outlined in E. F. Codd's original treatise on relational database design, and makes it easy for anyone to understand. If you want an elementary- through intermediate-level course on SQL, this is the one book that is a requirement, no matter how many others you buy.
--Arvin Meyer, MCP, MVP Even in this day of wizards and code generators, successful database developers still require a sound knowledge of Structured Query Language (SQL, the standard language for communicating with most database systems). In this book, John and Mike do a marvelous job of making what's usually a dry and difficult subject come alive, presenting the material with humor in a logical manner, with plenty of relevant examples. I would say that this book should feature prominently in the collection on the bookshelf of all serious developers, except that I'm sure it'll get so much use that it won't spend much time on the shelf!
-- Doug Steele, Microsoft Access Developer and author Over the last several decades, SQL has evolved from a language known only to computer specialists to a widely used international standard of the computer industry. The number of new applications deployed each year using SQL now totals in the millions. If you are accessing corporate information from the Internet or from an internal network, you are probably using SQL. This new edition of SQL Queries for Mere Mortals helps new users learn the foundations of SQL queries, and is an essential reference guide for intermediate and advanced users. The accompanying CD contains five sample databases used for the example queries throughout the book in four different formats: Microsoft SQL Server 2000 and later, Microsoft Access 2000 and later, MySQL version 5.0 and later, and SQL scripts that can be used with most other implementations of the language. | | | Product Details: | | | Author:
| John L. Viescas | | Paperback:
| 672 pages | | Publisher:
| Addison-Wesley Professional | | Publication Date:
| October 04, 2007 | | Language:
| English | | ISBN:
| 0321444434 | | Product Length:
| 9.19 inches | | Product Width:
| 7.01 inches | | Product Height:
| 1.32 inches | | Product Weight:
| 2.42 pounds | | Package Length:
| 9.5 inches | | Package Width:
| 7.3 inches | | Package Height:
| 1.7 inches | | Package Weight:
| 2.45 pounds | | Average Customer Rating:
|  based on 16 reviews |
| | | | Customer Reviews: | |
Average Customer Review:
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26 of 28 found the following review helpful:
 This Book Is Nothing Short Of Fantastic!Nov 27, 2008
By Larry
It's easy to find a good book that will provide definitions and examples for inner joins vs. outer joins, subqueries, etc. You can read them and understand the definitions and/or examples, however, when you come across a 10 - 20 line query in your job or have to create your own complicated query from scratch you realize just how tenuous your gut-level understanding of this mysterious thing called SQL really is.
This book will give you the gut-level understanding you so desperately crave - and need if you are working with databases.
The authors provide clear explanations of the various SQL constructs for both the SQL Standard and real world levels (which are oftentimes two different things). They further deconstruct real-world issues by also describing the anomalies between some of the more popular databases.
But you can get all this from just about any other good SQL book. Where this one really shines is the way it leads you from simple to more and more complex queries via well-crafted and well-explained examples. They progress from simple queries to queries containing expressions to filtering data with a 'where' clause to inner joins to outer joins to unions to subqueries to aggregate functions to grouping data and then filtering that data by 'having' clauses. They end up by covering updating, inserting, and deleting data.
They give tons of examples that illustrate how to solve common problems and the more trickier "gotchas" that you're likely to run into. These examples occur both within the meat of the chapter, i.e. where they are explaining terms and concepts, and at the end of the chapter where they describe how and why they put the queries together the way they did.
The queries are all against 5 databases containing from 6 to 13 tables each. The databases, tables, and all of the queries are contained on a CD ROM that accompanies the book.
Each chapter ends with 3 or 4 problems for *each* of the 5 databases. If you really want to learn how to write complex queries then do as many of the problems as you can. The solutions are on the CD so if you get stuck you can see how the authors solved the problem. The more you do, the more you will find that you can craft fairly complex SQL queries "from the hip". As one who did all of the sample problems I can assure you that that statement is no lie.
I cannot recommend this book enough.
21 of 22 found the following review helpful:
Great, but with a MAJOR caveat!Apr 23, 2009
By SoCal Thom
This book is terrific for database newbies, such as myself, who need to get up to speed on SQL as quickly as possible. But, please be aware of one MAJOR flaw if you are a (insert shudder here) Windows Vista user:
The book includes a CD, advertised as usable on either a Windows or a Mac system, for all of the sample databases and queries referenced in the text. On the Mac side, the files will load effortlessly (natch) -- but, if you are using Windows Vista, your system won't even see the Windows partition on the disk. Strangely, it will see the Mac files, but of course, you can't use them. If you are using Windows XP, however, the files show up just fine. Turns out that the CD is formatted as HTF, and Vista will not read those files. The files are not available online for download (at least as of this writing), so forewarned is forearmed.
12 of 13 found the following review helpful:
SQL reviewSep 10, 2008
By Jerry Vale "Sam"
This is a great book especially for a beginner starting to do SQL queries. The examples in the book are clear and easy to follow and it's nice there's a CD which has good examples also. The book also describes inner and outer joins and grouping data. This book has helped me in my work.
8 of 8 found the following review helpful:
Great book for getting you up and runningSep 14, 2009
By GameMaker
I took a new job where I needed to write SQL queries, and I had never done that before. No problem, I ordered this (and a couple other) book(s) and in essentially one afternoon I was able to write the queries that I needed to write, and understand how they worked. This book was the one that I used most in learning this stuff, so it gets a big recommendation from me.
This book takes you step-by-step in creating SQL queries. First simply using a "select" clause, then "from", then "order by" and so forth until you are learning how to put together some pretty complicated queries. I definitely felt like this taught me all I needed to know to get started. The book his some nice diagrams that show how the different clauses are put together, which I also found very helpful.
The only criticism that I have for this book, and I dock it 1-star for this, is that the book contains quite a bit of stuff that I consider useless, and just makes it a little more time consuming to wade through it than it really needs to be. For example, if you are reading the book sequentially, you must first read through chapters on this history of sql (yawn) and database design (useful, but seemingly out of place in this book) before you get into the "meat" of the book. Then once you get into the queries sections, it seems to give you a lot of examples which are basically identical to one another (in other words, redundant and unnecessary).
These are relatively minor complaints though, and it is a very useful and effective book.
7 of 7 found the following review helpful:
 Too Many MistakesNov 25, 2009
By Geeker
We used this book in our college course, and our professor is changing books next semester because this book is littered with examples that do NOT work. The examples in the book didn't work and the examples on the CD also did not work.
The examples didn't work 95% of the time because there were spelling mistakes in the table names or field names, or the author linked the wrong columns. He would say "This example shows how to do this..." and the example would do something completely different then the descritpion said it was going to do.
If your new to programming, this is going to do nothing but confuse you. I thought it was a decent book, until we got further into it and realized that there are on average 3 examples that do not even execute in each chapter after about chapter 7.
Also, on pages 601 (I think, there abouts) there is a complete schema of every sample database provided. Even those schemas are incorrect. They don't correctly reflect the databases, mostly because of spelling mistakes in the table names, and field names.
My professor is not very happy that he chose to use this book for our class.
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