On Sat, 22 Jun 2019 23:14:08 -0700 Ben Earhart <earhart...@gmail.com> wrote:
> can't be bothered to write example sql code While I'm sure you're irritated, that criticism is misplaced. You might want to take a step back. Tools that work with standardized languages don't define the language they process. You won't find many examples included with your C compiler or ODBC driver, either. It's not a matter of can't be bothered. It's a matter of choosing. Anyone who's done a lot of writing, especially technical writing IMO, has the problem of deciding what to include and what to exclude. Anyone who reads documentation appreciates the difficulty of finding the relevant information, and of skipping over what isn't relevant in case it (surprisingly) is relevant. SQL examples in SQLite documentation, except where they illustrate some preculiar aspect of SQLite's SQL, would be only so much noise: they would hinder the job of understanding the grammar. Necessarily, being examples, they would highlight only certain features of the grammar. You may say examples would help the beginner. But the reference manual is not a tutorial and not a user guide and not an introduction to SQL. The beginner is well advised to consult those kinds of materials as a way to learn SQL, and come back to the SQLite manual to learn how to use SQLite. Specifically. I started learning SQL before Bill Gates discovered the Internet. "Diving in" in those days meant going down to the bookstore at lunchtime to find out what there was to find out. Still today, the best way to learn about something is to read about it from someone who wants to explain it to you. CJ Date has sold 800,000 copies of his textbook, which in the technical book market is a runaway best seller. There are dozens of others just as good but not as popular. Avoid, if I may suggest, anything that promises to make SQL easy or implies that it's hard. It's not hard. But it may well be the only language you ever use that is grounded in math & logic. It has a more-than-casual relationship to the Relational Model, itself based on set theory and first-order predicate logic. It's worth your time to understand that, and you might as well work with an author who wants you to. BTW, SQL is more standardized than some give it credit for. While it's true that a given statement may be accepted by one DBMS and not another, a great swath of the language -- all the important parts -- work just fine. It's quite rare to find two implementations that both accept a standard query and produce different results from the same data. Have fun storming the castle. --jkl _______________________________________________ sqlite-users mailing list sqlite-users@mailinglists.sqlite.org http://mailinglists.sqlite.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sqlite-users
