Book excerpt: Taking readers through the basics of the language, right up to some more advanced topics, this book is a practical, hands-on resource and aims to keep the reader involved at all times Focuses on the SQL standard and is loaded with detailed examples and code; each chapter includes practice exercises that readers can challenge themselves with before looking at the sample solutions in the appendix Paul Wilton is a successful Wrox "Beginning" book author and is an ideal author to write for those who want a firm grasp of standard SQL before learning the details specific to a particular database product SQL is an international standard for manipulating data in databases and is used by database programmers in all major database systems: Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, MySQL, and many others