MySQL (and SQLite) for Data Journalists – danwin.com

My first task since joining Stanford was to create the Public Affairs Data Journalism I, a required course for all students in the graduate program. As public records and government workings deserve their own class, I didn’t know for sure if it’d be worth teaching SQL to my students, most of whom hadn’t gone beyond Excel.

But after running out of patience with the finicky nature of spreadsheet GUIs, I decided to unload a bevy of SQL syntax on my students earlier this month. They picked it up so quickly that last week, I based their midterm almost entirely on evaluating their SQL prowess, and I can say with some admiration, they now have more knowledge of SQL than I did after a year or so of self-learning…even though for many of them, this is their first time learning a programming language in the context of journalism.

I’ve been creating tutorials for their convenience, and you can use them too. Because I’m dealing with a variety of operating systems, from Windows XP to OSX 10.6 to 10.9, I decided to give them the option of doing the lessons in MySQL or SQLite…and it wasn’t too frustrating, though I spent more time than I’d like creating multiplatform datasets and lessons.

I’ll write more about my thoughts on teaching SQL in a longer post, but I can say that I am most definitely now a believer in moving past spreadsheets to SQL’s expressive way of data querying.