Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Learning DB the Right Way; Books, Tutorials, or What?
An anonymous reader writes "I have deep experience programming in many languages, and I've some exposure to SQL through PostgreSQL. My math goes so far as trig and algebra, with a little statistics. So far, I've learned enough to be dangerous: mostly via other people's code, experimenting, the PostgreSQL docs, etc. I've been successful using the DB in various ways, but I know I am missing a great deal (and probably doing it wrong, at that.) When DB articles come up on Slashdot, I don't recognize a good deal of the terminology. What is the best way for a technical person to learn SQL/DB work using PostgreSQL? Books? Tutorials? I should mention I don't have local access to a university or people with DB knowledge; have to do this on my own, so books or the Internet are pretty much my options."
When Stanford first offered free online courses, I took a couple including Intro to DB. It's an online course and it was very informative and I learned a lot through it. I'm not sure when it starts next (and if you can just enroll whenever to see material), but here it is: https://class2go.stanford.edu/db/Winter2013/preview/
Keep in mind though: this is a full fledged college class, not some sort of YouTube tutorial or anything like that. If you want to follow it properly, be prepared to spend some time a week doing homework and following lectures.
On Coursera you can find the Stanford course "Introduction to Databases" by Jennifer Widom. https://www.coursera.org/course/db . It is free and covers a very broad range of database topics.