I should probably mention up front that I am not really a member of the demographic that this book was written for (that being the fairly new students to relational database theory), but I liked this book nonetheless. What really endears the book to me, and in fact, the entire Head First series, is the geek humor that the author sprinkles liberally throughout the book. Wordplay, funny photo captions, and entertaining exercises abound to make sure that the difficult task of teaching something as dry as an introduction to SQL is as enjoyable and down-right entertaining as possible.
If you are familiar with other books in the Head First series, then you pretty much know what you are in for with this book. If you are not familiar with this series (and honestly, if not then why aren’t you?) then you are in for somewhat of a different experience than your typical beginner level technical book. For starters, the book uses lots of visuals and graphics to explain things. If the topic is learning how a select statement works, then the author hits you with building a dating service to illustrate the points. If the difference between sub-selects and outer joins is the topic, then the author drags both out onto the metaphorical stage to have a debate over why you should use one or the other. All of these implements, from outlandish scenarios to anthropomorphic database constructs are cleverly woven together to make sure that the information the author is presenting sticks to your grey matter. If you do the many and varied exercises in each chapter, then you really can learn this stuff and have a fun time doing it.
The book doesn’t assume that you have had any real experience with databases and it even has a chapter explaining why you would want to use a database in the first place. The content of the book also stays away from any database –specific information and sticks to generic SQL commonalities: selects, alter tables, updates, deletes, where-clauses, joins, sub-selects, aggregate functions, ordering, etc. Constraints, views, and some rudimentary security concerns are touched on, but not to any great degree.
The appendices are really a collection of esoteric topics that he author calls ‘left-overs’. There is a quick section on PHP (which seems a little out of place in such a general SQL programming book), GUI tools for databases, a list of reserved words, some additional information on data types, etc. There is a larger section for how to download and install a MySQL database, which is as close as the book comes to endorsing one database vendor.
As with most books, there are a few minor things that bothered me about this book in particular, and about the Head First series as a whole. For starters, the pictures and glyphs that the book uses get somewhat redundant after the first few times that you see them. Chapter after chapter, you see the same actors in the same or slightly different poses. In many cases, the only difference seems to be the text in the dialog bubbles that are attached to the portraits. I joked with a colleague of mine that we should have a caption contest and write our own dialog for a good number of the examples in the book. This seems to be a systemic problem with the series itself rather than a problem with Head First SQL exclusively, because I own a number of the other books in the series and they also use many of the same graphics and photos and actors in those books. Perhaps, just perhaps, it is a fiendishly devised mnemonic device to see the same images time and time again, but it strikes me as a tad redundant and a little boring after seeing the same images used to explain different topics.
In the final analysis of the book, I have to recommend this book to anyone who may be just starting out on learning SQL programming. Don’t expect this book to be the last book you will need to purchase on the subject if you are aiming to be a DBA, or even an enterprise developer, but it should definitely be the first one you buy.
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