Welcome to the SQL Learning Centre!

This is for you if you want to learn SQL. It starts from the very basics and finishes with being able to tackle almost any SQL query problem. I make no assumptions about any past programming experience you may have.

I created this course because I have strong opinions about how to learn SQL. My learning journey was unnecessarily long and frustrating, and I wanted to create something that eliminated all the frustrations and made learning SQL as easy and fast as it could be.

Teach what is needed

All information presented is essential to writing SQL and there are no irrelevant details. Let me be very clear about the purpose of this course. It is to learn to write advanced SQL queries. It is not to teach theory, technical jargon, history, or big picture ideas. We get straight to the point and start writing.

When I was a beginner, I did not have enough knowledge to figure out what was essential to know and what wasn't. I overconsumed and forgot most of it because it was irrelevant.

If you want to learn these other things, that's fine. There are great resources for this, and you'll be in a good position after completing this course. It's just not needed to write SQL.

Practice is the only way

You can't learn this skill by consuming tutorials, doesn't matter how good they are. You have to actually write SQL to learn to write SQL.

So most of the course content is real practice questions. You can solve all of them live from your browser.

There are no long pages of info with a whole lot of concepts thrown at you at once. Only one small concept is explained at a time. To ensure mastery, it is immediately reinforced through directly relevant practice before moving on.

Perfect ordering

If I ask you to say "Go for a walk and buy those items" in a language you don't know, you first need to know how to say "Go for a walk" and "Buy those items" separately.

There is no point in me asking you to say the whole sentence if you don't know the components. All SQL questions can be broken down into components that need to be solved, then combined together. If you understand all the components, no question is truly hard because it can always be broken down to easy components.

If you can't solve an SQL question, it's because you either don't know at least one of the components or you haven't practiced enough to recognise when it is needed. That's all.

If you go though this course in order, you will learn each simple component separately, then have practice combining them. There will never be a point where you get stuck or frustrated because the questions build on each other perfectly. Even the later "hard" questions.

Instructions:

Go through the course in order. Read the tutorials and do the practice questions that follow. These questions require you to write real SQL in the code editor on the webpage, then submit them for feedback. They are checked by a machine and you are told if they are correct or not. If they are incorrect, you will be provided with feedback so you know why. Try until you are correct. You must solve the questions before moving onto the next. They build on each other.

Have fun learning!

Developed by Edward Gauld