Who Should Read this Book?

This book will be valuable to anyone who works with a DBMS that supports SQL. While our emphasis is on programming with SQL, you do not need to be a programmer to learn SQL from our examples. We do assume you know something about Windows and something about C, but our main concern is that you are interested in using "ANSI Standard SQL" in your projects. This is both a beginner's and an advanced-user's book. Our hope is that a beginner will be able to avoid the traditional "for beginners" books which, sadly, contain so much drivel that it is impossible to advance from them without re-learning everything.

Your Windows knowledge needn't be extensive, as we won't be getting into the details of the Windows Application Programming Interface (API). We'll touch only on things that occur in all versions of Windows, and occasionally analogize with Windows concepts and terms.

As for C, we assume you can read simple C programs, even if your favourite programming language is something else. We want to show you examples of SQL as it's used in programming projects -- that is, in company with a "host language" -- and C seemed the convenient choice. All example programs shown provided are short.