A new edition of this title is available, ISBN-10: 0672330180 ISBN-13: 9780672330186 Sams Teach Yourself SQL in 24 Hours, Third Edition presents the key features of SQL (Structured Query Language) in an easy to understand format with updated code examples, notes, diagrams, exercises, and quizzes. New material covers more information on transactions, constructs, embedded databases, and object-oriented programming. In this edition, the authors include examples based on a database like MySQL, a very popular open source database.
Hard to define whom this book I would recommend to. For someone who is completely new to the topic, some part of it would be challenging or even confusing. If you already know the basics, then most of it will be boring for you.
What I used it for is to check, if I really have covered "the basics". As an autodidact SQL learner it was helpful to see some kind of structure.
Even without reading another beginner SQL books I am sure you can easily find a better one.
The books is pretty average. If you're totally new to SQL, it will confuse you on every other page. The structure is not so clear, the code samples should have some more distinctive formatting, instead they're visually blending with the text. What's unforgivable, however, are the errors in some examples. Even though I was able to spot some of them, it makes you wonder how many you didn't notice.
If you don’t already have a basic grasp of SQL, this book won’t help much. If you do, it will probably only frustrate you. How have they made it to a sixth edition with this many errors!? I borrowed it free from my library, and I still feel ripped off. I did learn a few things as a very raw beginner, but mostly it was by reading these guys’ attempted explanation and thinking “that doesn’t even make sense” or “what the hell are they trying to show me here?” and going off to experiment on my own. Half the time I came back to make sure I hadn’t missed or misread something and confirmed that there was indeed a mistake or omission in the text ... maybe that was their intention all along? No, I’m pretty sure they’re just sloppy hack authors.
Overall I would not recommend this book. As a database administrator of 10 years and a course instructor, I considered this book for my sql course. The technical information was good and presented a good intro to the basics. However, the book contained lots of errors that made the assignments and examples difficult to follow. It seems as though the book had been updated to use new source code and new examples but lots of references to old code were not replaced. It was very confusing and frustrating. The editors need to go back through the book and fix the mistakes. It would be a decent book for beginners if they fixed them.
The book tells the reader to go to Appendix D to get the CREATE statements to create the tables needed to use the remainder of the book. Appendix D does not contain that information nor does anywhere else that I can find. All reviews on Amazon also say the same thing.
I chose to study this book for my lab examination on SQL. It's suitable for people who already know something about SQL. I wouldn't recommend it to beginners, because it doesn't have many examples and some of them are wrong.