pierredewet

Al Sweigart (Automate the boring stuff, Recursive book of recursion…) live codes on YT (https://youtube.com/@AutomateTheBoringStuff)

This is my preferred option also but I love reading the comments when these sorts of posts appear as it seems that interviewing is still something that causes loads of debate and no matter whether the op is whiteboard, tricky algorithm or <other> focussed, there’s still a hot debate. Interviewing just seems broken

It must surely boil down to the profession aspect. Doctors and lawyers do a period of internship after and during the degree that perhaps mitigates the uncertainty around hiring. I doubt that doctors are asked to bring in a cadaver to operate on during an interview for a new position, or lawyers are asked to jump into court unprepared and defend someone as part of the hiring practice.

It sometimes seems that programming jobs need to be a calling. Ie: you spend 50 hours a week at job doing the thing but then are also asked to have a portfolio on the side that you presumably do in your spare time.

It could just be an American thing, though. Perhaps hiring is seen as very risky because sv salaries are so out of proportion to the standard across the rest of the working environment, in addition to there being very little quality control regarding professionalism in the industry that makes technical hiring such a minefield.

I found that it depends on where your interest lies. If you just want to learn practical SQL then I have historically found the Celko books (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Celko) as well as, more recently, the No Starch Press books (https://nostarch.com/practical-sql-2nd-edition) very well written. Everyone learns differently however. I have a colleague who really enjoyed the O’Reilly books specific to SQL from a data analytics perspective. (Apologies, no link for that)

You might frequently find the No Starch and O’Reilly books on Humble Bundle, (https://www.humblebundle.com/books?hmb_source=navbar) if that is available in your location.There’s often loads of overlap between bundles. I’m sure I’ve bought the python book about 5 times so far but I don’t mind as it’s great value.

If you want to learn about database theory, however, as well as the practicalities of SQL, then I found that most of the resources I used when I did this at uni were online. The book we used was the Connolly/Begg book (https://www.pearson.com/us/higher-education/program/Connolly...)

I don’t think this effectively answered the “why” of your question, however. My guess is that SQL is a very well established domain language and when it comes to data normalised across many tuples it’s the standard for manipulation.

I don’t think that dataset size is the primary reason to manipulate data via SQL; I think that the moment your programme starts to need more than a single flat file data source, you naturally start to think about normalisation, indexes etc for performance and sanity.

If I may, however: I am coming at this from the other way in that I am far more often manipulating CSV and excel data and would like some good resources in how to quickly load that in to a dataframe in pandas or similar vs using SQL. (If I’m responding to a thread hijack I may as well go all in and totally derail it)

I’ve used PostGIS with a Flask (and some js) front end when I was working on my MSc. (Mapping deprivation and services by postcode) Worked amazingly well and was relatively easy to get used to once I read the O’Reilly PostGIS book to get used to the function calls. As with any data project; munging the data into a usable format was the biggest hassle.

Edit: used google maps for the display before they changed their licence. Haven’t updated to OSM yet...

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