[geek] gripe otd

[snidegrrl]

Every single book on SQL I have (total of 4) has been largely useless in either of these two situations

Comments

Reference

[rakin]

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/tsqlref/ts_ia-iz_6mek.asp

Re: Reference

[snidegrrl]

bookmarked :) although i will say that i am not fond of their frames or format or whatever the heck that is they have going on there.

Re: Reference

[rakin]

True but it has info

[snidegrrl]

see!! i knew it!! :)

[jsciv]

Books on SQL are so ten years ago. Just go to google, type in

SQL Server "y thing"

and look there. You'll get hits faster than books in most cases. But for MS SQL Server specifically, get a client CD and get the Books Online program. It's FANTASTIC.

[snidegrrl]

That's exactly what I did that worked, btw.

[snidegrrl]

I even made a post a while back about which books to buy, trusting my friends list, and purchased based on their recommendations. The problem is, even browsing I never know what I'm going to need or what question I'll be trying to answer until I need it. I should compile a list of questions and keep them with me and test every book against them. Except that I'm so too lazy for that.

[bizarrojack]

It depends on the language. For perl, since you can't google $_ etc., a book is best, although now that I know more regexp stuff, I know how to escape the searches that I would want to do against the man pages. For nearly everything else, google is great. for PHP there is php.net. For C, you have "man function"

[bizarrojack]

I take it back about C, I had college courses teaching me and pointing me at books, and all I had was shitty altavista and a 14.4 baud modem, so I can't really speak to how best to learn it.

Library school BS

[ex_midwinte]

This is how most high-level technical types get most of their information! When studied they always express either frustration or contempt with books and talk about how they ask their peers first.

I just thought it was important for you to know that you are not alone.

Re: Library school BS

[snidegrrl]

I was wondering if it's just me, like it's a learning style thing, as in I am illiterate and have to be spoon fed everything.

Re: Library school BS

[jsciv]

Not really. I use books for perl, C and other programming languages: handy organized references that don't require me to swap out of what I'm doing are far preferable to hit-or-miss. The thing is that for SQL in particular, printed references are almost never organized well or indexed properly (which is kind of amusing really, since you'd think that a book about databases would have some way to be referentially consistent.....).

Re: Library school BS

[snidegrrl]

i guess i should learn something other than sql then! ;)