ISBN0672324512

Sams Teach Yourself SQL 4th ed. is a great book for the beginner. It explains (otherwise complicated) concepts in normal everyday language.
What I don't like about this book is that the chapter 'Day 6' is pretty brief; the authors could have spent a lot more time explaining this function, especially since this is the most commonly used funtion in sql. I've also noticed numerous typos. For example, on p 185, the book asks you to create a table and name it "part", but when they give examples they use the name "parts" to refer to the same table (hmm...perhaps I should be directing this to the publishers). And the third aspect of this book that I dislike is the fact that there is no CD-rom. It would have helped alot and saved me a lot of time the writers included all of the example tables on a CD-rom, rather than having the reader type out all of the codes himself/herself.

This is a good book for beginners but also gets you on the path to more advanced SQL programming. However, beginners beware: I think I found a programming typo in nearly every chapter of the book. The most glaring to me was in Day 14 (p. 340) when a column named "NEW_TOTAL" was referenced in view LATE_PAYMENT (created from table BILLS). BILLS has an AMOUNT field but no NEW_TOTAL field. I have over 20 years programming experience and I had to disregard this entire example. I fear beginners will miss these types of mistakes. If this is one of the better books available (as stated by a previous reviewer), then I'm not sure what book to buy. No typos should exist in a book designed to teach programming.

I used this book a few years ago when I began learning SQL. The book is pretty good. It helped me learn and understand sql. The book even talks about PL/SQL and Transact-SQL. Read it and pay close attention to the statements and you will get most of it. If you can download an oracle database software for free, install it annd practice what you are learning from the book. Practic helped me a lot to learn quickly.

great book for a beginner.
SAMS Teach Yourself SQL in 21 days,
I am happy that I have bought this book.
Best regards,
Thomas
Germany

Sam Teach Yourself SQL in 21 days looks like a rough draft. In Chapter 4, a DB called 'Conversions' is used but in the examples "From Convert" is used. One cannot reference a DB by the wrong name. This occurs again in Chapter 6 on Joining DBs where a 'PARTS' DB is referred to in examples as 'PART'. There are other errors of various types. I am constantly having to error check why an example does not work. If one likes troubleshooting this is a good book to practice with. Also the index does not allow one to look up 'DECIMAL', and some other terms that would be good to reference . If the book had been adequately edited, it would be a much better book to study from.