Reddit reviews Sams Teach Yourself SQL in 10 Minutes (3rd Edition)

At my (statistics-based) internship, I call SQL from SAS as it is generally faster and more parsimonious than using SAS procedures to manipulate data.

I don't really know of any online resources, but I found this book helpful, and it is rather inexpensive Teach Yourself SQL in 10 minutes

Note: The title is a bit of an exaggeration...

If I were in your shoes, I would do the following:

Step 1: Learn HTML and CSS

W3Schools intro on these topics is free, and I feel they do a good job.

http://www.w3schools.com/html/default.asp

Once you've gone through both of the HTML and CSS lessons there, spend some time foucsed on creating a static website. Once you know the basics of HTML and CSS, go out and find a website you like and try to re-create it from scratch. When you run into trouble use a browser plugin like FireBug to look at the source of the site and understand how something is coded, then code it yourself. This is, bar none, the best way to learn how to make a visually appealing website.

Step 2: Learn the basics of Ruby

The reason for choosing Ruby is the framework I'm going to suggest shortly relies on Ruby. I suggest learning Ruby first rather than learning the framework itself as you need to understand the basics of programming first. If you already have an understanding of the basics of programming (e.g. variables, functions, classes, loops, arrays, etc) then you can skip this step and just look at a brief intro to Ruby. If you have no programming experience, then you should go through a Ruby book to get starated.

Unfortunately I don't know much about quality intro Ruby books. Ruby was the first programming language I learned, but that was 5 years ago. When I learned Ruby, I used this:

http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Ruby-Novice-Professional-Experts/dp/1590597664

I would suggest going to /r/ruby and seeking out advice there about the best beginner book, though. Ruby has seen several new versions since the book I linked above was published.

Don't move on to the next step until you've finished a Ruby book and written a few non-trivial programs.

Step 3: Use Sinatra

Sinatra is a really light web framework. Learn more about it here: http://www.sinatrarb.com/

It's an excellent choice for someone who is new. I strongly suggest that you do not start using a more popular framework like rails for now. The nice thing wth Sinatra is that it does very little for you. It's going to force you to understand a lot of what Rails hides away.

Learning Sinatra should only take 30 minutes or so.

Write a non-trivial Sinatra app, but don't try to do anything that involves a database. Just store your data in a flat file and read and write it as you go.

Step 4: Learn how to use a database

Read a book that introduces the basics of SQL. Use the knowledge you gain from that book and create a Sinatra app that interacts with a database. For simplicity's sake, I would use SQLite to begin with. But you should eventually try to make an app that uses something like MySQL or PostgreSQL.

Note: Regardless of whether you're using SQLite, MySQL or PostgreSQL, they all use a language for querying called SQL. So any SQL book is fine. I've heard good things about this book (http://forta.com/books/0672325675/) but I've never read it myself.

Also, be sure that when you are doing SQL in this Sinatra app that you write queries yourself rather than using an object relational mapper. None of those terms will make sense now, but when you get to the SQL portion just look them up and it should become apparent. If you get to this step and don't understand what I was referring to, just send me a PM and I'll help you out.

Step 5: Learn about Javascript and jQuery

You now know the basics of making a dynamic web application, so now you should use W3Schools to learn Javascript and jQuery.

Here's the W3schools link again:

http://www.w3schools.com/js/default.asp
http://www.w3schools.com/js/default.asp

Step 6: Learn AJAX first WITHOUT jquery, and then with jquery

Learn about AJAX (here's a W3Schools link about it: http://www.w3schools.com/ajax/default.asp). First write an application that uses AJAX through javascript, then once you get the hang of it use jQuery to do the same task. jQuery simplifies the process a fair bit, so you'll generally do your ajax with it, but the reason you first do it with javascript is so you understand what jQuery is doing behind the scenes.


Step 7: Learn Ruby on Rails

Now that you know how a framework like Sinatra works, and you see a bunch of the other stuff under the hood, it's time to graduate to rails. Rails offers you a lot more than Sinatra does – in short, it will generally save you a lot of time. The reason you learned Sinatra before Rails, however, is that without knowing Sinatra Rails would be doing magic that you don't understand.

Nonetheless, as you go through rails and you see it doing something magical, dig in and try to figure out exactly what it's doing and how. Even though it's great Rails does so much for you behind the scenes, it's important that you understand what it's doing and how.

–--

Hope this helps! Let me know if you have any questions.

Edit1

Also, once you have finished all of the above steps, do the following

• Learn Bootstrap
  
• Learn SCSS, SASS or LESS
  
• Learn CoffeeScript

SAMS Teach Yourself SQL in 10 Minutes