SQLBolt – Learn SQL with simple, interactive exercises

SQLBolt is by far the best SQL tutorial that I’ve ever seen!  Yes, I know, it’s a very bold statement.  But I promise that it’s true.

With hundreds of books, videos, and other tutorials around, the problem of delivering the understanding of data management, databases, and SQL to regular people still hasn’t been sold.  But SQLBolt provides a giant leap forward in this area.

The tutorial starts from the very basics and gets progressively more and more advanced.  But this progression is divided into small, very focused chapters.  Each chapter provides a brief description of the concept, an example query for the concept, and a set of exercises.  The exercises are all interactive, so that you don’t have to install a database or get access to a real one, and you don’t have to trust yourself on correctly solving the tasks.  The interactive exercises system marks the problem as solved the moment you type in the correct query.

If you get stuck at any point with any particular exercises, just click on the Solution link nearby, and the tutorial will show you the correct answer.  I found this to be a perfect balance between forcing the reader to try things out, but without the annoying delays for those of us who like to skip ahead.

There is really no reason now for anybody at all to learn SQL.  SQLBolt is brilliant!

A Comprehensive Guide To Web Design

A Comprehensive Guide To Web Design” is a rather lengthy article that focuses on the non-technical bits of the web design.  It’s not about the tools and technologies, but more about the meaning and good practices.  The article covers the design of navigation, content, call to action, web forms, accessibility, and other important bits which are frequently forgotten.

GitHub : Quickly review changed functions in your PHP pull requests

GitHub is one of the greatest tools for developers ever.  And it keeps getting better.  Most of the new features that GitHub introduces are usually generic and apply to all developers universally.  Today, however, they have a special present for the PHP developers – Quickly review changed functions in your PHP pull requests.  This is mighty useful, especially on the larger pull requests.

7 ways to do containers on AWS

7 ways to do containers on AWS” covers a variety of different ways to run containers on the Amazon AWS cloud infrastructure.  These include most of the usual suspects, like Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS), and hand-rolled vanilla containers on EC2, as well as a few lesser known ones like templated Kubernetes and Amazon Fargate.

Vue.js — answering the Why, after 15 months

Harshal Patil shares his positive experience with the Vue.js JavaScript framework, after using it for just over a year in “Vue.js — answering the Why, after 15 months“.  As many before him, he focuses on the virtual DOM, optional but powerful build system, state management, single file components, performance, testability, and a few other benefits of this particular technology.

It’s good overall article for those who are still deciding which JavaScript framework to go with for their next project.