Simon and Drake, hello. On 2010 Dec 26, at 23:49, Simon Slavin wrote:
> On 26 Dec 2010, at 10:22pm, Drake Wilson wrote: > >> I think this is part of the disconnect. I don't get the feeling that >> the SQLite documentation is intended for people who have little or no >> SQL background, but rather as a reference for those who are already >> familiar with SQL relational databases, but not SQLite particularly. > > This is correct. Teaching people how to use SQL efficiently is not a task > that the SQLite team have taken on. There are many web pages and books to > teach that. This is a strong point, which I'm not disagreeing with. It's true there are many 'SQL for dummies' pages around the web, but none of them, as far as I've found, are any good. They tend to be prolix, vague, and written, well..., for dummies. They tell you things that are obvious from inspection of a few SQL queries. The SQLite web pages, on the other hand, are very good. They're compact, authoritative, and written for grown-ups, and that's why it's worth taking the trouble to say that paragraph X could fairly painlessly be made clearer. I'm broadly familiar with SQL, but vague on details; I can read a standard perfectly happily, but I read the paragraph in question several times, carefully, and still came to the wrong conclusion. I offer this as a datapoint, with alternative text -- that's all. I'm not asking anyone to do anything -- I'm just saying. Writing clearly is hard, and all of us have produced stuff that was transparent when we composed it, but which left our readers scratching their heads; and we never know unless they tell us. At any rate, I don't think I'm contributing much to the conversation now, so I'll leave you to it. Best wishes, Norman -- Norman Gray : http://nxg.me.uk Dept Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK _______________________________________________ sqlite-users mailing list sqlite-users@sqlite.org http://sqlite.org:8080/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sqlite-users
