I know what you’re thinking – SAMs: Teach Yourself [blank] in 10 minutes… how can that be good in any way shape or form? This must be the single good book in their line up, because this book is fabulous for learning SQL. I had a job where I had to learn SQL in a few days (at least the basics, enough to do some basic web development) and this book was recommended to me. It ended up working out great. Each of the chapters is devoted to a particular concept in SQL, be it basic joins, inner and outer joins the select statement, etc. There are plenty of good examples given for each statement and in general a lot of good, high quality explanation. This is not a good all-in-one book – it is really only suitable for learning the basics of vanilla SQL. That being said, I now feel confident that I could pick up any book about a particular flavor of SQL, or about optimizing SQL on a particular platform, and understand it well.
Additionally, this book is so short and so well organized it functions very well as a reference book. It is very easy to look up various operations and see how they function, complete with a variety of examples.
Working Through the BookLog 