Best Books for Learning SQL: If you want to acquire a solid and good grip over the fundamentals of Structured Query Language (SQL) and its functionality in the real-world context, then the following books are hand-picked and considered to be the best books for learning SQL could definitely be our picks.
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What is SQL?
Structured Query Language (SQL) is one of the renowned and most used languages utilized for creating, manipulating, accessing, querying, and managing database. SQL is considered the standard for communicating with various relational database management systems (RDBMS) such as Sybase, Oracle, MySQL, Informix, Microsoft SQL Server, and PostgreSQL.
No matter if you are a programmer, a business intelligence end user, a data analyst, or a full-stack developer, you have to learn SQL as learning SQL is incredibly helpful for analyzing data quickly, querying databases, sorting and organizing data efficiently, operating online Business Intelligence (BI) tools, and efficiently using the advanced features of BI platforms.
7 Best Books to Learn SQL
Sams Teach Yourself SQL in 10 Minutes by Ben Forta
“Sams Teach Yourself SQL in 10 Minutes” is one the Ben Forta’s bestselling books and a must-read book for beginners.
This book focuses on teaching you SQL methodically and systematically and the parts that a complete beginner needs to know such as simple and basic concepts like data retrievals and complex concepts including the use of SQL, stored procedures, sub-queries, triggers, cursors, and table constraints.
The book contains 22 short and quick lessons, each lesson taking only 10-15 minutes to complete.
SQL QuickStart Guide: The Simplified Beginner’s Guide by Walter Shields
“SQL QuickStart Guide: The Simplified Beginner’s Guide” by Walter Shields has used a very friendly, interactive, and easy-to-understand tone. This book has made learning SQL so fun and easy. Also, since you will get plenty of problems related to data analysis and data manipulation in this book, this book caters and could turn out to be the first pick for beginners as well as those who already are in the data analysis field.
The book also has technical terms and fundamental terminologies for a better explanation, wherever required, and thus builds a firm foundation for learning SQL smoothly.
SQL Cookbook by Anthony Molinaro
“SQL Cookbook” by Anthony Molinaro will act as a great reference for you if you have some basic knowledge and understanding of queries such as select, update, and insert queries.
This book does cover the basic queries part but is like a crash course as it majorly focuses on understanding and writing complex queries, fine-tuning your queries, data preparation, grouping, manipulation, and reporting.
This book also contains lots of examples of certain queries that you are likely to face in a real-life situation.
Head First SQL – SQL Book by Lynn Beighley
“Head First SQL” by Lynn Beighley is an extremely unique book as the writer adopted an approachable way of writing it. This book’s visually rich format is designed by keeping the way how the human brain works in mind. Since the human brain tends to remember visuals or pictures containing texts rather than normal content, so this book has a lot of pictures on the sides with plenty of quick tips that help the reader in remembering all the tit-bits and concepts.
This SQL book has followed a fun, neat, simple, and unique approach to show the basics of SQL and how to take effective and efficient advantage of this book.
One of the best parts about this book is you will be able to solve a certain problem which could lead you to some another problem that can be solved using a different approach and by this way, you will get to learn lots of approaches by starting with a single problem.
So, whether you are starting from scratch or brushing up on the basics, this book could be your first on your priority list.
SQL Practice Problems: Book by Sylvia Moestl Vasilik
For all those who are thinking and looking to utilize SQL as a future job language or developers and business professionals, this book will act as a ‘learn-and-do’ guide that would be fun, rewarding, practical, and easy-to-understand and go-through. Since this book has got plenty of real-world scenarios and situations, it serves you just right if you want to dive into the working mode for solving such real-world problems.
This amazing book for beginner’s on SQL offers concepts and background into the language’s set-up instructions, syntax, a sample database, and 57 real-world challenges and problems that will help to take up your skills to an entirely different level along with having a good grasp of the foundations of SQL.
This book will give you the perfect exposure to solving real business problems using SQL.
SQL Beginner’s Guide & 7-Day Crash Course by John Russel
“SQL Beginner’s Guide & 7-Day Crash Course” by John Russel holds the power to teach you everything that you wants to know from total scratch, highlighting, and appreciating the importance of SQL and how it can help with end-to-end project reporting and execution to making you learn and write all the basic queries of this language.
Since this book also covers all the major and important statistical analysis topics, so it turns out to be a great reference for data scientists and data analysts.
The book has followed a traditional yet effective and efficient approach of increasing the difficulty level chapter by chapter. You will get enough examples in this book to hold a perfect, great, and effective grip over all the basic and complex concepts of the language.
While reading and going through this book, you will surely be able to picturise the complete role of this language in a client-server-based system, how the entire RDBMS works, and how to keep the data secure. So, if you have the curiosity of learning SQL from A-Z, then this book would be going to be a perfect and smart pick for you.
SQL for Data Analytics: SQL BOOK by Upom Malik, Matt Goldwasswer, and Benjamin Johnston
“SQL for Data Analytics” is a great book for both; beginners and advanced learners. Since the writer has used a friendly and soothing tone so while reading this book, it feels like you are getting instructed by an instructor.
The range of topics covered in this book is wide, starting from basic queries to complex window functions.
This book majorly focuses on fine-tuning queries for better performance and using complex data types for analysis which makes this book more perfect for data scientists.
