My Favorite SQL Links

Learning a new programming language can be challenging to some, while come completely naturally to others. When I was in college, my best source for learning a new language was the class itself, and teachers. When working on your own projects and encountering your own first set of seemingly irreparable errors, it does help to have a teacher answer the questions that the books do not cover for what you are specifically attempting to do.

Of course, this will only work if that person is available within a learning environment, if you have a mentor or friend to help you, or if you explain the error within a forum. Forums usually are of great help, but sometimes it is difficult to convey what you are trying to achieve. As an amateur programmer, I had personally found getting information from multiple sources to be the best way to learn. If I came across a difficult concept within the book, I found reading up from different sources until it made better sense. YouTube is also very helpful when learning or even sometimes useful for experienced developers. I also find other blogs to be heavily useful because they can contain anything from answers to common problems, or even share excellent methods.

SQL is my favorite language, and I am delving into a new part of it every day. I do plan to branch out to other languages, but SQL and SSIS (SQL Server Integration Services) have been my major focus for now. My first SQL Server book was Murach's SQL Server 2008 for developers. Even though this is just a book my college picked out at the time, I still find it quite useful to go over. I am still using http://www.w3schools.com/sql/ for code reference. Even though it is easy to memorize code I use daily, I still do not have the years of experience that quite a few do. I reference this quite a bit. I recently used this comprehensive tutorial for Fuzzy Lookup in SSIS: http://www.codeproject.com/Tips/528243/SSIS-Fuzzy-lookup-for-cleaning-dirty-data , as well as SSIS Adventures with Fuzzy Matching: http://consultingblogs.emc.com/jamiethomson/archive/2005/03/30/SSIS_3A00_-Adventures-with-Fuzzy-Matching.aspx .

So far, using tutorials and modifying them to my needs has been the best rout, and I do hope to add my own ideas to the world of tutorials eventually.