Select Star SQL

This is the repository for selectstarsql.com. It is an interactive book that teaches SQL by conveying a mental model for writing queries.

Development

The structure of the code is pretty standard for a Jekyll-built site. See Jekyll Directory Structure.

All the pages are stored as markdown(.md) files in the top-level directory. Jekyll takes these markdown files and converts them into html files in /_site. During the conversion, it does all sorts of cool energy-saving things like embedding them in templates with standardized header and footer elements. These templates are stored in /_layouts.

You can serve a local version by running jekyll serve.

The main technical complexity lies in the interactive sql exercises. These are implemented as a custom html tag in /scripts/main.js. Firefox doesn't support custom html elements by default, so we pulled in the custom-elements.min.js library from unpkg. (See _layouts/default.html.)

Contributing

To contribute, either email me directly at [email protected], or submit a pull request by following these steps:

• Install Jekyll
• Fork this repo (button on the top right)
• Clone your forked repo git clone https://github.com/MYUSERNAME/selectstarsql/
• Make your changes
• Run jekyll serve and check your changes on your browser at your localhost address. This will probably be http://127.0.0.1.
• Commit your changes, and push it to your forked repo
• Click "Create Pull-request" when looking at your forked repo on Github.

Licensing

The prose of the book is licensed by Zi Chong Kao under a Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 License which allows sharing and adapting under the same license and with attribution. The code and datasets are released into the public domain under the Creative Commons CC0 License.

Todo

• Complete hiatus tutorial
• Clarify double quotes for SQLite
• Improve CASE WHEN explanation