SQL: Intermediate Level SQL from the Ground Up

I’ll admit, I approached this audiobook with skepticism. Too many SQL guides either dumb things down or drown you in jargon. *SQL: Intermediate Level SQL from the Ground Up* surprised me by doing neither. Dvorjak assumes you’re not a beginner—no hand-holding on `SELECT` statements here—but he also doesn’t assume you’re a DBA. The focus is on *intermediate* skills that actually matter: subqueries, window functions, and performance tuning. The examples are refreshingly practical, like debugging a slow-running report or merging datasets from different sources. I especially appreciated the section on common pitfalls (looking at you, `JOIN` missteps), which saved me hours of future headaches. Corrie Legge’s narration is a standout. She avoids the trap of sounding like a textbook robot, adding subtle emphasis to key terms without overdoing it. That said, the production isn’t perfect: a few sections with dense code snippets could’ve benefited from a slower pace or even a companion PDF (which, annoyingly, isn’t mentioned in the audiobook itself). And while the book excels at *how* to write better SQL, it skimps a bit on *why* certain methods outperform others—some deeper dives into query execution plans would’ve elevated it further. Still, for the price and runtime, this is one of the few SQL audiobooks I’d actually recommend to a colleague. It’s lean, useful, and—dare I say—almost *enjoyable* for a tech manual.