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But after running out of patience with the finicky nature of spreadsheet GUIs, I decided to unload a bevy of SQL syntax on my students earlier this month. They picked it up so quickly that last week, I based their midterm almost entirely on evaluating their SQL prowess, and I can say with some admiration, they now have more knowledge of SQL than I did after a year or so of self-learning…even though for many of them, this is their first time learning a programming language in the context of journalism.
I’ve been creating tutorials for their convenience, and you can use them too. Because I’m dealing with a variety of operating systems, from Windows XP to OSX 10.6 to 10.9, I decided to give them the option of doing the lessons in MySQL or SQLite…and it wasn’t too frustrating, though I spent more time than I’d like creating multiplatform datasets and lessons.
I’ll write more about my thoughts on teaching SQL in a longer post, but I can say that I am most definitely now a believer in moving past spreadsheets to SQL’s expressive way of data querying.
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