Reddit reviews An Introduction to Database Systems (8th Edition)

> how to use google to solve a programming problem

You can't. You have to figure out how to solve the problem yourself. Then you use Google to look up individual pieces of that.

In other words, you have to go "Well, I need to open the file, then read it line by line, find the first opening brace, find the last closing brace, and extract the piece of the string between those two braces, then print that out."

How do I open a file? I can google that.

How do I find the opening brace? I can google that.

How do I chop out the middle of a string into a new string? I can google that.

See what I mean?

> CS textbooks in general just aren't as well written

Not any more. People just generally don't give a shit, I've found. I've learned numerous programming languages by reading the manual for the compiler in older times. Nowadays, you're lucky if there's even a formal spec of the syntax of the language, let alone a complete readable manual. The "Ruby on Rails" text that seems to be the authoritative text is full of stuff like "this routine seems to do ...." meaning the guy writing it doesn't actually know, and didn't bother to read the source code to figure it out for sure.

However, the good news is that the classic books full of the knowledge that does not become outdated are actually very well written. Start with some of Knuth's texts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Computer_Programming), Date's book on SQL and relational models (http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Database-Systems-8th/dp/0321197844), Bertrand Meyer on OOP (http://www.amazon.com/Object-Oriented-Software-Construction-Book-CD-ROM/dp/0136291554) and so on. (That last is even available as a PDF floating around.)

> some of the knowledge you gain could become potentially outdated in the future

Everything that you could look up on Google will be outdated in about five years. The stuff about how computers work, how to solve problems, etc never gets outdated.

On the other hand, it's one of the few jobs where you can take a job to do X and start working on it without any idea of how to do X. I've been programming almost 40 years and I've never taken a job that I knew how to do when I took the job.

Introduction to Database Systems by Chris Date. It's a solid introduction to the theory and to practical issues. The author helped develop the relational database model at IBM with E. F. Codd. He's a hard-line advocate for the relational model. Some people think he's too hard-line. It will help you make database enemies because you'll think you know more than other people do.

Read C.J. Date, Introduction to Database Systems.

PHPAdmin is not learning databases.

http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Database-Systems-8th-Edition/dp/0321197844

http://www.doctrine-project.org/2010/07/27/document-oriented-databases-vs-relational-databases.html

> Relational databases were traditionally the most obvious solution for applications that needed to store retrieve/data. With the growth of internet user-base, the number of reads and writes a typical application needed to perform grew rapidly. This led to the need for scaling. Traditional RDBMSs were hard to scale (SQL operation or Transaction spanning multiple nodes doesn’t scale well). With solutions like MySQL Cluster and Oracle RAC , this is much less of a problem now, but it wasn’t the case for a while, which led to many companies abandoning traditional RDBMSs for “noSQL” data stores.


https://www.google.com/search?q=document+-oriented+databases+vs+relational+databases

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1289130/database-where-should-i-start-from

https://stackoverflow.com/a/1289160
>Introduction to Databases course: http://infolab.stanford.edu/~widom/cs145/
>and this textbook: Introduction to Database Systems, An (8th Edition)
>http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0321197844

D?

4000 record excel doc? or 4000 excel documents

y'all motherfuckers need Date https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Database-Systems-8th/dp/0321197844