Show HN: Select Star SQL, an interactive SQL book • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: Select Star SQL, an interactive SQL book

#111

Post by zemo » Tue, Sep 04, 2018, 5:15 PM UTC

rootlocus wrote: post #70

Why did you use death sentence cases as data? I've spent around 20 minutes just reading the last words of various executed people. It's... disturbing and distracting.

it's data that asks to be investigated. There is no reason to query meaningless data. A query that tells you something you didn't know is infinitely more useful than a query that tells you what you already knew, and a dataset that encourages you to ask your own questions and craft your own queries is infinitely more effective than, say, an imaginary book catalog or some other nonsense that doesn't at all tempt the student to ask more questions of the data.

and besides: technology is a facet of society, it is not a purely rationalist act.

Re: Show HN: Select Star SQL, an interactive SQL book

#112

Post by dang » Tue, Sep 04, 2018, 5:27 PM UTC

yAnonymous wrote: post #74

rootlocus wrote: post #70

Why did you use death sentence cases as data? I've spent around 20 minutes just reading the last words of various executed people. It's... disturbing and distracting.

Why did you continue for 20 minutes if it disturbs you so much, little snow flake?

This breaks the site guidelines. You unfortunately have a history of posting uncivilly to HN. If you would please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it. The idea here is: if you have a substantive point to make, to make it thoughtfully; and if you don't, to not comment until you do.

Re: Show HN: Select Star SQL, an interactive SQL book

#113

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Sep 04, 2018, 6:24 PM UTC

m_st wrote: post #65

Congratulations! I love this kind of interactive tutorials as their helping more and more people learning stuff without a boring book and no exercises. That said: Doesn't work in Firefox and Edge? Common, are we back in 1998? Sorry for the rant, but please don't do that.

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: Select Star SQL, an interactive SQL book

#114

Post by icc97 » Tue, Sep 04, 2018, 7:49 PM UTC

m_st wrote: post #66

dm8 wrote: post #11

This is good intiative. We need to simplify pedagogy. On a related note, I always found the syntax of SQL to be great. Someone told me that simplicity of SQL made relational databases even more popular. It is one of the best designed language where even someone new to the field won't feel intimidated. I'm surprised designers of SQL haven't won the Turing Award yet.

I agree except one thing: SELECT cols FROM table. This should really be FROM table SELECT cols as every modern SQL editor will then be able to show you a list of available columns. See LINQ. There they had the opportunity to fix it and it works just great.

I'd rather have the enjoyment of being able to think in normal English speak rather than Yoda speak just to fix one edge case that appeared decades after they came up with the syntax.

Re: Show HN: Select Star SQL, an interactive SQL book

#115

Post by ddgflorida » Tue, Sep 04, 2018, 7:59 PM UTC

guu wrote: post #33

duxup wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://selectstarsql.com/frontmatter.html Scroll down to Dataset. After "I’ve prepared for this book:" There is a little interactive code editor you can type in and run the query.

I was confused too. It appears the page does not work on Firefox. I get a "customElements is not defined" error in the console in Firefox and none of the interactive sections render. The page works fine on Chrome.

Doesn't work on Chrome for me - Version 67.0.3

Re: Show HN: Select Star SQL, an interactive SQL book

#116

Post by speeddaddy406 » Tue, Sep 04, 2018, 8:41 PM UTC

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Re: Show HN: Select Star SQL, an interactive SQL book

#117

Post by cristoperb » Tue, Sep 04, 2018, 9:56 PM UTC

I just finished working through it. It is well written with an interesting if macabre example dataset. The interactive bits worked well once I enabled web components in Firefox.

Re: Show HN: Select Star SQL, an interactive SQL book

#118

Post by hesk » Wed, Sep 05, 2018, 9:03 PM UTC

piaste wrote: post #107

m_st wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree except one thing: SELECT cols FROM table. This should really be FROM table SELECT cols as every modern SQL editor will then be able to show you a list of available columns. See LINQ. There they had the opportunity to fix it and it works just great.

More generally, statements should appear in the same order as they are executed, as far as this is possible. This nullifies some other common sources of confusion, such as which statements are executed before a GROUP BY and which ones after (and why HAVING exists as a keyword). It's also similar to how CTE syntax is generally much more readable than subqueries.

The order of clauses in a SQL statement should have no relation on the order of execution because SQL is a declarative query language. The query specifies what the user wants and not how the system should compute the answer.

This declarative property also provides a (somewhat weak) motivation of why SELECT should come first. Precisely because it answers part of the WHAT, i.e., the schema of the result.

Re: Show HN: Select Star SQL, an interactive SQL book

#119

Post by swaggyBoatswain » Thu, Sep 06, 2018, 12:57 PM UTC

djrobstep wrote: post #32

The choice of example database (the death penalty) is terrific. So much more interesting, important and compelling than the usual tired customer/product examples. I'm tired of seeing the implicit assumption around the place that software is just about business. Software should be about more than that.

I like the death penalty database, it makes things so much more interesting and memorable. Data doesn't have to be boring

Re: Show HN: Select Star SQL, an interactive SQL book

#120

Post by orcs » Thu, Sep 06, 2018, 6:42 PM UTC

As someone who has never really touched SQL except very briefly during a degree module, which basically taught me nothing, I enjoyed this. I think it taught me some good stuff. I will need to go back through it as I didn't pick it all up.

That said, as a novice, the challenge questions are not in anyway suitable for a beginner. I wouldn't, and didn't, have any idea how to do them; or know where to look to find a starting point. The previous chapters do not prepare you for the challenges and I came away thinking I was useless until I click the solutions and realised there was no way I would realistically ever been able to solve them without some form of further training in SQL.