I agree with you on the "shelling out money for books", I hate paying for crappy ones and have done it way to many times. However, when I was reading one of my Linux books I read about the chattr command and something called the immutable bit, didn't have a use for it, but thought it might come in handy later. Few months go by and someone has a problem where he can't delete files in his home directory even as root, remembering that the immutable file bit does this I looked it up again and told him to check if it was set and sure enough it had gotten set. Turned out to be a known bug in reiserfs, I'm guessing a rather uncommon one. Had I been following tutorials I might have not gotten this. The real problem is finding quality tutorials. I, of course, will check out any links you guys have sent me, might save me money ;-) . I like both resources for learning, but I think the internet is better when you have a specific objective and books are better when you have a general objective.
<br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 3/26/06, <b class="gmail_sendername">Jeremy Bowers</b> <<a href="mailto:jerf@jerf.org">jerf@jerf.org</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Caleb Cushing wrote:<br>> Perhaps I should explain why I'm learning SQL, I'm trying to learn LAMP<br>> (Linux Apache MySQL Perl/Python/PHP) I have the Linux part down pretty<br>> good (hopefully pass my tests). But the other parts I need to work on.
<br>> The only thing I really know about SQL is that it has something to do<br>> with databases, or at least prior to what you all are telling me. Thats<br>> one of the reasons I'm thinking of getting a book, books tend to be more
<br>> in depth than tutorials, although a lot of books are crappy. I also have<br>> a problem with tutorials, I like to get lazy and copy and paste.<br><br>At least the one I linked is less tutorial than a step-by-step
<br>explanation of SQL starting from scratch. There's not actually a project<br>in it (IIRC), and you'd still have to set up databases and stuff on your<br>own. It is unlikely to be all that different from a book.<br><br>
Your money, of course, and I'm an oddball in that I almost never buy<br>books. (Not unique, I've met others with my philosophy online, but<br>definitely a firm minority.) But this is one place where I *really*<br>don't see an advantage to shelling out for a book. SQL is really, really
<br>old and the core has changed very little since the late 80s, maybe<br>longer. It's just like I really wouldn't recommend a book to learn HTML<br>anymore, because as a relatively static topic (emphasis "relatively";
<br>what advances there have been with XHTML for instance can still largely<br>be ignored in practice) the free resources have had plenty of time to<br>mature.<br><br>By comparision, a book to learn Ruby might be worthwhile, at least if
<br>you've never used anything like it before. (Probably not worth it if you<br>already know Perl or Python, for instance.)<br><br>> I like<br>> the compiler vs language comparison, however can't say as I know much<br>
> about compilers 10 years ago, as I would have been 11, and didn't have a<br>> computer.<br><br>Well, I wouldn't have been much older. That's just the next best example<br>I could think of where there is a programming language standard that you
<br>can theoretically learn, but there are quirks.<br><br>I suppose HTML would be a modern-day example if you drop the programming<br>language requirement. Theoretically you shouldn't need to learn<br>"Internet Explorer HTML"; in reality, you pretty much do.
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