Do you ever run across those books that you really wish you had found when you were starting out in one field or another? For the last several years I've been working on a software project that forced me to get down into the nitty gritty of JDBC development and SQL statement execution. And, as I tend to do, I found a resource that I felt adequately described a particular area of technology and stuck with it.
The book that I've been using for years now is SQL for Dummies. It has existed beside my work desk and referenced to the point where it's dog-eared and looking like something one of my dogs dragged in from the back yard. SQL for Dummies taught me the fundamentals of using SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE statements at a high level, which was enough for me at the time.
Did it teach me everything I needed to know? Not really, but that wasn't its goal. SQL for Dummies was enough to get me started in the right direction. Other online resources (courtesy of Google) would provide more specific examples of various vendor-specific SQL dialects or more complex statements.
So when I finally started looking at Learning SQL, Second Edition by Alan Beaulieu, I had a foundation in the basics of SQL but had no idea about the background, theory, or the hows or whys one method should be used over another. This book starts out with the basics and within the first 50 pages begins to go way past what SQL for Dummies covered.
Beaulieu provides examples he develops over a period of chapters. Initially he covers the history of databases and the transition from nonrelational data to relational models. The most interesting fact I learned early on in the book was that SQL is not an acronym for "Structured Query Language," even though many people (including myself before learning that it's not true) would swear it does. It's just the name a group at IBM came up with to describe this language over the course of a few iterations - it was first DSL/Alpha, then SQUARE, SEQUEL, and finally SQL.
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