(Part 3) Best sql books according to redditors
We found 487 Reddit comments discussing the best sql books. We ranked the 102 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the products ranked 41-60. You can also go back to the previous section.
First don't think of this as "DBA" stuff - you're a developer, you need to know database technology, period. Read this rant by Dennis Forbes in response to Digg's CTO's complaints about databases it's very reminiscent of TFA.
Read Data and Reality by the late William Kent (here's a free copy) and get a fundamental understanding of "information" vs. "data". Then read Information Modeling and Relational Databases to pickup a couple practical approaches to modeling (ER & OR). Now read The Datawarehouse Toolkit to learn dimensional modeling and when to use it. Practice designing effective models, build some production databases from scratch, inherit some, revisit your old designs, learn from your mistakes, write lots and lots and lots of SQL (if you want to get tricky with SQL I suggest to pickup Celko's SQL for smarties - it's like the Hacker's Delight for SQL).
Many strange models you may encounter in the wild are actually optimizations. Some are premature, some outright stupid, and some brilliant, if you want to be able to tell one from the other then you're going to dive deep into internals. Do this generically with Modern Information Retrieval and Managing Gigabytes then for specific RDBMSs Pro SQL Server Internals, PostgreSQL Internals, Oracle CORE, etc.
Reflect on how awesome practically every modern RDBMS is as a great technological achievement for mankind and how wonderful it is to be standing on the shoulders of giants. Roll your eyes a little bit whenever you overhear another twenty-something millenial fresh CS graduate who skipped every RDBMS elective bleat about NoSQL, Mongo, whatever. Try not to fly into murderous rage when another loud-mouthed know-nothing writes at length about how bad RDBMS technology is when they couldn't be bothered to learn the most basic requisite skills and knowledge to use one competently.
Sure :)
EDIT: Added links to Amazon just in case anyone wants to see reviews.
[$1 Or More Tier]
Head First Ruby
Head First C
Head First Object-Oriented Analysis and Design
Head First SQL
Head First Statistics
[$8 Or More Tier]
Head First Javascript Programming
Head First PMP
Head First HMTL and CSS
Head First C#
Head First Agile
[$15 Or More Tier]
Head First Design Patterns
Head First Java
Head First Python
Head First Learn to Code
Head First Android Development
Have you read any of Marcus Winand's stuff? He has a blog called Use the Index, Luke, which is superb.
I also have his book, which is also excellent: SQL Performance explained.
"Python for Data Analysis" is pretty good. It's written by Wes McKinney, the creator of Pandas, so its focus is using Pandas for data analysis, but it does include sections on basic and advanced NumPy features: http://www.amazon.com/Python-Data-Analysis-Wrangling-IPython/dp/1449319793
Alternatively, the prolific Ivan Idris has written four books covering different aspects of NumPy, all published by Packt Publishing. I haven't read any of them, but the Amazon reviews seem OK:
I highly suggest the following:
1st) Buy How to learn SQL in 10 minutes and do some reading. Its a basic book written with a lot of examples to get you up to speed in a short period of time. It has multiple code examples for various databases.
Sam's Amazon Link
2nd) Install a version of SQL. I suggest MySQL or SQL Server Express
3rd) Start playing with the example databases in both of those books and I believe SQL in 10 also includes a sample database for both of those distributions.
Not as highbrow literature but it's Learning PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, and CSS: A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Dynamic Websites for me. I knew how to write HTML files, I knew how to write CSS files, but I didn't know how to serve an actual website. If you want to learn how to set up a simple website of mostly HTML files with some basic logic, good luck. Nobody writes about that. Every online tutorial tells you to use some framework to setup a website, I couldn't tell where the webdev basics ended and framework specific knowledge began. Eventually I caved and bought that O'Reilly book, and it taught me everything I needed to understand what framework tutorials were actually doing. Can't beat a good book for the basics.
I'd recommend first, the Inside SQL Server Series mentioned above. Also I'd recommend the Guru's guide to Transact-SQL. I found it really enhanced my skills in T-SQL over the years. I'd run into some difficult problem only to think 'hey, the guru's guide had something on this....'. I tried to re-read it every year. Also, lots of good code samples.
The Stanford Algorithm book is complete overkill in my opinion do NOT read that book. That's insane. Read it when you've been doing programming for a while and have a grasp of how it even applies.
Here's my list, it's a "wanna be a decent junior" list:
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Reasoning: So, the first book is to give you a sense of all that's out there. It's short and sweet and primes you for what's ahead. It helps you understand most of the basic industry buzz words and whatnot. It answers a lot of unknown unknowns for a newbie.
Next is just a list languages off the top of my head. But you can pick anything, seriously it's not a big deal. I did put Java first because that's the most popular and you'll like find a mountain of resources.
Then after some focused practice, I suggest grabbing some SQL. You don't need to be an expert but you gotta know about DBs to some degree.
Then I put an analysis book that's OOP focused. The nifty thing about that book, is it breaks into design patterns nicely with some very simple design patters to introduce you to design patterns and GRASP.
Then I put in a legit Design Patterns book that explains and explores design patterns and principles associated with many of them.
Now that you know how code is structured, you're ready for a conversation about Architecture. Clean architecture is a simple primer on the topic. Nothing too crazy, just preps you for the idea of architecture and dealing with it.
Finally, refactoring is great for working devs. Often your early work will be focused on working with legacy code. Then knowing how to deal with those problems can be helpful.
FINAL NOTE: Read the soft skills books first.
The reason for reading the soft skills books first is it helps develop a mental framework for learning all the stuff.
Good luck! I get this isn't strictly computer science and it's likely focused more toward Software Development. But I hope it helps. If it doesn't. My apologies.
Itzik Ben-Gan has several books that come highly recommended. Carlos Chacon's Zero to SQL book is new and I've heard positive things.
https://www.amazon.com/T-SQL-Fundamentals-3rd-Itzik-Ben-Gan/dp/150930200X
https://www.amazon.com/Zero-SQL-20-Lessons-language-ebook/dp/B01MYORI53
> What they give you is pretty limited though... not nullable, foreign key references, uniqueness... What would be really more valuable is along the lines of the example I gave end of last comment, or restricting dates to be on a certain day of the week, or numbers to a certain range, etc etc.
Errr, there's the very generic CHECK constraint that lets you use Boolean expressions and I believe support everything you mention above out of the box (except for MySQL of course). Here's the PostgreSQL reference page on them, and here's an example of a constraint I used in my last project to make sure all the times stored in the database were in the same time zone:
ALTER TABLE time_slots
ADD CONSTRAINT time_slots_check_slot_time
CHECK (EXTRACT (TIMEZONE FROM slot_time) = '0')
You can do a lot more, as well as call stored procedures for calculations that are not built in. Of course, you have to write those procedures first :-)
> You mentioned something you did 94-96... which was right when I started high school. Think there is actually a bit of a generational gap on this LOL.
Yes, I do believe there is :-) I started programming in my junior year in high school, punched card FORTRAN "IV" on an IBM 1130 in 1978. Scare quotes because that dialect didn't have logical IF statements, each IF would GOTO another line, based on the result being negative, 0, or positive.... Trust me, except for the educational value, the aesthetics of handling card decks and feeding them into the card hopper etc., you didn't miss much. Sent me straight to the library to read up on software engineering.
> I don't really have an issue with using the constraints provided by an RDBMS... I just think they are woefully insufficient and that that logic should exist primarily in the main application code.
Here we should just agree to disagree, this is a fundamental and highly contested architectural issue, neither of us is "wrong", we each think a different choice is better.
> Another big part of that is I don't want an app too closely coupled to the choice of database, regardless of what it is.
That's not terribly hard to arrange, you've just got to have the self-discipline to use generic SQL, data types (or easily interchangeable ones, you've got all sorts of levels of isolation available), etc. I.e. I generally use this reference first, before getting database specific, and make note of the database specific features I use. Of course, I really try to limit the choices to solid MVCC ones, i.e. Oracle and PostgreSQL.
> (Although the comeback to that is of course SQLite).
Of course, although I've worked on a system that used the Sleepycat version of the Berkeley DB key/value database but didn't do much with that part of it, and as I mentioned before in less detail, incorporated a SQLite like single client object database called directly from C++ in a greenfield project I was the architect and primary developer of. I'm by no means dogmatic about this, I just have my preferences for complicated interrelated data.
Binary assets will depend on the database, I suppose, they've generally got a blob data type, but I've never used a RDBMS with blobs of any great size (4K or less if I remember correctly). Have never done geocoordinate data, did an interview for a job doing that, I know that's a specialty and would likely use a purpose built database for it, or I've heard PostgreSQL has an ... addon? that's supposed to be hot.
> But arguably the Mongo document model is better since read/write speed is much more paramount over making sure each and every metrics record was written OK.
"metrics record"? Note that except for perhaps one data warehouse application where I suppose loss of a few rows could have been tolerated (but that wouldn't come up except in ETL failure), it was imperative that the data was treated with ACID care.
SQL Server MVP Deep Dives vol. 1
and..
SQL Server MVP Deep Dives vol. 2
T-SQL Fundamentals is what I used. It's a top notch SQL book written by an expert, arguably the foremost expert, on the T-SQL language (Microsoft's SQL derivative.) It's the only programming book I've read cover to cover. Although, tbh, I really struggled with the chapter on ACID. While I acknowledge its importance, it was incredibly boring imo.
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amazon.com.au
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amazon.it
amazon.es
amazon.com.br
amazon.nl
amazon.co.jp
amazon.fr
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I would add The Guru's Guide to Transact-SQL. It was written by a good friend of mine and he used it to teach me. It's a little rough for beginners, but if you have excellent math skills it will really get you thinking about some of the deeper issues that SQL involves.
I took and passed the 70-450 back in 2009, so I can't really remember the exam questions on it. I didn't take the course but I studied mostly using the Transcender practice test and read this book cover to cover.
Soft NUMA is something I don't have committed to memory, so it would have been a guess for myself.
I'm actually scheduled to take the 70-457 upgrade exam (1 of 3) next Friday and have been mainly memorizing SQL syntax, as that's part of the exam now.