How do I learn SQL?

What do you want to learn it for? If just for fun or personal interest, I would suggest just downloading SQLite and start tinkering. Also, I find the "Learn Code the Hard Way" free books to be easy to follow with plenty of examples. Learn SQL the hard way.

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Anything other useful things I should be learning along the way?

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You should probably look into how databases are structured, as well as some other languages and tools to build apps on top of the database.

I hear ya

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The type of jobs that I want, I'll need to know it. It won't be the same without the work experience with it, but I feel like I'll have a better chance at landing a job if I know what I'm doing and can adapt quicker.

So kind of a professional development deal.

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Ah, well SQLite is probably still a good place to start since you could jump right in and be writing SQL today. That book I linked is still a work in progress (only about the first half is complete), but the things you learn there should be applicable to essentially any database with little modification. And there are of course plenty of other free resources to learn from.

maybe check out Coursera

I teach my company's internal training courses on Oracle SQL and have been using it every day for over ten years.

First off, it's a great thing to learn. Once you know it well you're an asset basically anywhere you go.

But don't think you're going to learn it by memorizing very much. It really is a language, a way to express ideas involving data. You won't learn Spanish by memorizing a bunch of vocabulary, you have to actually use it. It's the same with SQL.

You have to struggle with real problems first, and for beginners I like books that have problem sets, just like a textbook. Starting out you have to learn the SELECT ... FROM ... WHERE syntax. At some point also table joins.

The more perceptive students will wonder why is all that data broken up into tables in the first place when you could just put it all in a spreadsheet, but that's a separate topic. For now just work through as many problems as you can. Just like playing an instrument.

I went to a potpourri course at ull a couple of fridays to learn the basics.

after you know the basics you can pretty much google your way around to learn more.

I am always intrigued by seeing others code as there is about 100 ways to accomplish the same task