Re: The Art of SQL
От | Christopher Browne |
---|---|
Тема | Re: The Art of SQL |
Дата | |
Msg-id | 871wrxxn8j.fsf@wolfe.cbbrowne.com обсуждение исходный текст |
Ответ на | The Art of SQL (Gordon Haverland <ghaverla@shaw.ca>) |
Список | pgsql-novice |
ghaverla@shaw.ca (Gordon Haverland) wrote: > On Thursday 03 August 2006 12:46, Brad Nicholson wrote: >> On Thu, 2006-08-03 at 08:59 -0600, Gordon Haverland wrote: > >> > I'm a little more than half way through this book (The Art of >> > SQL), doing a book review of it for my local LUG. >> > >> > All in all, it looks like a very good book to me. I do think >> > that it should be looked at by novice SQL people, if for no >> > other reason that to try and keep certain bad habits from >> > forming. >> > >> > For the novice, I think some other document which talks more >> > about indexes and foreign keys is needed as well. >> >> That's not the books target market. If you read the section at >> the start "Assumptions made by this book" - it assumes that >> you're already pretty darn familiar with databases, SQL, >> indexing, ect. I'd imagine that there are books target at the >> Novice market that are more appropriate. > > I looked at that. I still think that anyone who is writing SQL > will still benefit from reading it. Or, at least reading the > stuff they understand. And with time, I'm sure they will have > moments when they realise, "... that's what he meant when he > wrote ...". My preference would be to have some sort of "starting reference" under my belt first... TAOS assumes you already know what a SELECT is, what a JOIN is, what, in general, GROUP BY does, and such. But I'm not sure it's needful to get to the "grizzled, wizened old master" point for the book to become of value. It does quite a good job of describing strategies for generating good queries rather than horrific ones. And while there is certainly a "knack" for writing SQL, I don't think it's the same as some of the languages where there needs to be a tutelage of fighting through writing ghastly stuff before reaching an epiphany after which it starts to make sense. For instance, in Lisp, beginners tend to write ghastly, awful stuff consisting of fighting to pull apart lists, and accomplishing pretty much complete destruction of them in the process. Forth beginners do the same sorts of things with code where you can't see the logic beside all the "stack smashing." _Good_ code in these languages has very little of the "struggle to shove data structures to and fro;" the experts know how to accomplish things without fighting with the language. I suppose an argument can be made that a "TheirSQL" model of the world involves a naive view where "data smashing" takes place in the front end application, but I'm not sure how far it would be good to take that. It seems to me that TAOS would be worth being exposed to fairly early. I always preferred seeing *good* references to things, and competent code samples. I've never been all that keen on C, but was never disappointed to have learned it from K&R. They were very skilled with it, and their examples demonstrate reasonably skilful use. I think seeing some examplary code early is *way* better than plodding through crud before seeing anything good. -- wm(X,Y):-write(X),write('@'),write(Y). wm('cbbrowne','gmail.com'). http://cbbrowne.com/info/languages.html Black holes are where God divided by zero.
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