Which book would you recommend for learning this stuff? I'm not very interested in 800-p. gorillas; there surely must be something short, not too theoretical, and to the point.
Bill Karwin's "SQL Anti-Patterns Strike Back" presentation on Slideshare.com presentation is worth checking out -- it's 250 slides long, covers 4 kinds of anti-patterns (in queries, DB creation and the design of both DBs and applications). And he goes through actual code examples.
I'd recommend Head First SQL (http://www.headfirstlabs.com/books/hfsql/). I started on that book with no real coding knowledge whatsoever (except a long-forgotten Java class that I took circa 1996). Plugging away on that book a few hours a week for a few months taught me enough SQL to get my foot in the door to a new career.
