Ask HN: Best SQL Courses?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31355809

by zbhoy • 4 years ago

4 8 4 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Hey HN!

With the recent influx of SQL posts and lots of jobs in my field (tech sales, customer success, product, analyst) listing SQL experience as a bonus or even preferred now, I was wondering if anyone had a go to beginner SQL course?

I have basics programming skills to the extent of someone who has taken CS classes in HS and is familiar with GitHub,terminals,etc, if that helps.

Tomte• 4 years ago

I liked Mastery with SQL: https://www.masterywithsql.com/

zbhoy3• 4 years ago

This looks great and affordable! Thank you!

CRConrad• 4 years ago

W3Schools Online SQL Tutorial: https://www.w3schools.com/sql/default.asp

Dunno how far that will get you; certainly seems to cover the basics of syntax and so on. The harder part is the mindset, thinking in sets and being able to translate what you want to do into SQL. But I guess that's the hardest part of... Well, pretty much everything. And hard to package into lessons; maybe it's something everyone has to grok for themselves, so it can't hurt to try this first -- at least it seems free of charge. (I've looked up stuff, probably including SQL AFAICR, on W3Schools and never paid anything.)

I suppose one of the best things you could do is download some simple SQL client (and possibly server), SQLite or MariaDB or Firebird or something, and an example dataset like Northwind Trading or some such, and just start playing around.

Hope this helps!

zbhoy3• 4 years ago

Thanks for sharing! The idea of also downloading some stuff and just playing around is helpful. Might do that alongside courses

qohen2• 4 years ago

There are many free resources online for learning SQL. Here are some of them:

Khan Academy has a SQL course:

https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/computer-programming/s...

The one in the first link below is interesting in that it then sets you up for the SQL Murder Mystery in the second link:

https://mystery.knightlab.com/walkthrough.html

https://mystery.knightlab.com/

The "walkthrough" link above mentions that if you want to learn SQL more deeply to try selectstarsql.com, which looks good:

https://selectstarsql.com/

This looks interesting too:

https://sqlzoo.net/wiki/SQL_Tutorial

Most of the above have databases available for you to immediately try out what you're learning, which should be helpful (sqlzoo.net also seems to have some more advanced topics covered too).

There are also a bunch of (multi-hour) courses on YouTube:

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ayoutube.com+sql+cours...

If you go the video route, there are sites like SqlFiddle.com and freedatabase.com, etc. that let you set up databases so you can practice what you learn from the videos without having to install anything (though you can do that too, of course):

https://www.google.com/search?online+sql+database

I hope you find at least some of the above to be useful. Good luck with it.

zbhoy3• 4 years ago

This is amazing! Thank you so much

qohen2• 4 years ago

You're welcome. :-)

Also, there are some (legitimately) free SQL books that might be worth a look:

https://www.linuxlinks.com/excellent-free-books-learn-sql/

Then there's this freebie, which is interesting in that it's compiled from StackOverflow, whose content is licensed under Creative-Commons -- GoalKicker has a bunch of these on various tech topics. Anyway, the SQL one might have some useful tips/tricks:

https://books.goalkicker.com/SQLBook/SQLNotesForProfessional...

(It has gotten good ratings and reviews:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40730648-sql-notes-for-p... )

They also have such books on specific databases: MySQL, Postgres, SQLServer and Oracle -- see all their books on their main page:

https://books.goalkicker.com

And, once you learn SQL, you might want to check out webpages (and YouTube videos) of SQL tips/tricks to pick up useful tidbits:

https://www.google.com/search?q=sql+tips

https://www.google.com/search?q=sql+tricks

Ask HN: Best SQL Courses?

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