<\/p>\n
My first job since becoming a member of Stanford was to create the Public Affairs Data Journalism I, a required course for all college students within the graduate program. As public data and authorities workings deserve their very own class, I didn\u2019t know for positive if it\u2019d be value educating SQL to my college students, most of whom hadn\u2019t gone past Excel.<\/p>\n
But after working out of endurance with the finicky nature of\u00c2\u00a0spreadsheet GUIs, I made a decision to unload a bevy of SQL syntax on my students\u00c2\u00a0earlier this month. They picked it up so rapidly that final week, I based mostly their midterm nearly completely on evaluating their SQL prowess, and I can say with some admiration, they now have extra data of SQL than I did after a yr or so of self-learning\u2026regardless that for a lot of of them, that is their first time studying a programming language within the context of journalism.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve been creating\u00c2\u00a0tutorials for his or her comfort, and you should use them too. Because I\u2019m coping with a wide range of working techniques, from Windows XP to OSX 10.6 to 10.9, I made a decision to provide them the choice of doing the teachings in MySQL or SQLite\u2026and it wasn\u2019t too irritating, although I spent extra time than I\u2019d like creating multiplatform datasets and classes.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ll write extra about my ideas on educating SQL in an extended put up, however I can say that I’m most undoubtedly now a believer in shifting previous spreadsheets to SQL\u2019s expressive method of information querying.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n