The art of SQL
by Stephane Faroult, Peter Robson · first published 2006
89% recommend11% neutral
Why HN recommends it
A practical SQL book with a readable, opinionated voice on real-world issues. It suits working developers who want to go beyond the basics and improve their SQL skills.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
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…main mental challenge is just learning to think in sets. Joe Celko has some writings specifically about that in his various books. After that, the best book I've seen for SQL and practical issues is The Art of SQL: http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596008949/ Hope that helps. There's a lot of really bad writing about relational databases out there.
on “Normalize First” ↗I really recommend the books by Stephane Faroult, especially "The Art of SQL". Unfortunately I could never find anything online by him, except these videos: https://tonguc.wordpress.com/2008/01/29/good-sql-practices-v... and not sure if this is what you are looking for.
on “Ask HN: What is the best online resource to learn advanced SQL?” ↗…this fork because the practicioner-focused redis book this guy wrote is one of the best software-related texts i've read in the past 7 - 8 years. ("Statistical Rethinking" by Richard McElreath, and "The Art of SQL" by Stephane Faroult are two others that had the same impact)
on “Forking Redis: SSL/TLS and Transactions” ↗…prevalence, but loosely categorized Databases: High Performance MySQL: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1449314287/ SQL Queries for Mere Mortals: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0321992474/ The Art of SQL: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596008945/ Networking: TCP/IP Illustrated: https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0201633469/wrichards... (updates on author's site at http://www.kohala.com/start/tcpipiv1.html)…
on “My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day” ↗…interesting books with personality even for a dry topic such as Sql eg Itzik Ben-Gan for sql server for general sql Joe Celko opinionated but entertaining, Stephane Faroult one if the best ever sql books "The Art of SQL" , Use the Index luke is great - even Chris Date's academicy books are more interesting than any single postgres book which is a shame since Postgres is truly amazing application.
on “A list of PostgreSQL libraries, tools and resources” ↗Adding to the above, Schönig's Mastering PostgreSQL 11 will help you advance from intermediate to high-intermediate PostgreSQL programmer, as will Faroult's The Art of SQL. Karwin's SQL Antipatterns is useful supplementary reading also. I've looked through my kindle, and I wouldn't bother with much else.
on “PostgreSQL 13” ↗We all know the popular ones, but I would like to hear about the not-so-popular ones that are still worth reading. I'll start: - The Art of SQL by Stéphane Faroult That's it. It's a bit hard to come up with more, so I don't expect a huge list of books in this thread.
on “Ask HN: Non-popular books every software engineer should read?” ↗I really liked 'The Art of SQL', Stephane Faroult
on “Books I recommend to my software engineering students” ↗A billion "Up" for The Art of SQL by Faroult
on “Advanced SQL and database books and resources” ↗…business requirement may come across as a platitude. In practice, the excitement of technological challenges often slowly causes attention to drift from the end to the means…” —Stephane Faroult, “The Art of SQL”
on “Ask HN: For those programming 10+ years, what do you wish you knew 4 years in?” ↗