front matter
preface
My experience with the SQL language started in the late 20th century when I first worked with relational databases. I wasn’t a software developer, and my programming skills were limited mostly to typing a few DOS commands on a home computer. Yet even though I was thrust into learning how to use SQL to perform my job, I quickly found how easy it was to write and execute scripts in this intuitive programming language.
In the years since, I’ve shared my knowledge of SQL with hundreds of colleagues. What I’ve found interesting is that most of these colleagues weren’t software developers either; they were folks in other departments, such as finance, marketing, or sales, who needed to use SQL to directly access data that was vital to the organization. They didn’t have time to learn concepts like third normal form and tuples. They just needed to learn a few basic commands to get started.
If you think about it, we learn a lot of things in life this way. Most of us didn’t learn how to build a car before we learned how to drive. We didn’t go to culinary school before we started cooking meals. We didn’t learn how hard drives stored data and how processors managed CPU threads before we started using computers. Rather, we learned a few necessary concepts and methods to get going and continued learning more as we progressed.