Practical SQL: A Beginner’s Guide to Storytelling with Data

Book Name: Practical SQL: A Beginner’s Guide to Storytelling with Data
Author: DeBarros Anthony
Publisher: No Starch Press
ISBN-10: 978-1593278274,1593278276
Year: 2018
Pages: 527 Pages
Language: English
File size: 5 MB
File format: PDF

Practical SQL: A Beginner’s Guide to Storytelling with Data Pdf Book Description:

When people ask which programming language I learned first, I often absent-mindedly reply, “Python,” forgetting that it was actually with SQL that I first learned to write code. This is probably because learning SQL felt so intuitive after spending years running formulas in Excel spreadsheets. I didn’t have a technical background, but I found SQL’s syntax, unlike that of many other programming languages, straightforward and easy to implement. For example, you run SELECT * on a SQL table to make every row and column appear. You simply use the JOIN keyword to return rows of data from different related tables, which you can then further group, sort, and analyze. I discovered SQL to be a powerful language, one that fundamentally shaped my understanding of what you can—and can’t—do with data. SQL excels at bringing order to messy, large data sets and helps you discover how different data sets are related. Plus, its queries and functions are easy to reuse within the same project or even in a different database.

Practical SQL is the work of many hands. My thanks, first, go to the team at No Starch Press. Thanks to Bill Pollock and Tyler Ortman for capturing the vision and sharpening the initial concept; to developmental editors Annie Choi and Liz Chadwick for refining each chapter; to copyeditor Anne Marie Walker for polishing the final drafts with an eagle eye; and to production editor Janelle Ludowise for laying out the book and keeping the process well organized. Josh Berkus, Kubernetes community manager for Red Hat, Inc., served as our technical reviewer. To work with Josh was to receive a master class in SQL and PostgreSQL. Thank you, Josh, for your patience and high standards. Thank you to Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) and its members and staff past and present for training journalists to find great stories in data. IRE is where I got my start with SQL and data journalism.