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Weird feeling for me: In a few of these #DataCamp courses, I'm now feeling lost when I'm doing the exercises. I think I need to spin up a separate data analysis project using #R-Lang, or #Python + #numpy + #pandas or #SQL ... or maybe do the same project three ways.
With SQL, at least, it seems to be an artifact of the way their hands-on code runner works (Displays a short `head` of the relevant tables ... so when you're working on queries, you may not have a direct way to see whether your query does specifically what you expected and intended.)
With R-Lang, it is just that it isn't always apparent what the language will do. Some things are inexplicably backwards compared to most other languages I've seen, so mentally I tend to go with the wrong choice. Also, the practice question set is too small. I've reached the point where some of the practice exercises are familiar enough that I know which answer to choose immediately without having any understanding of why that is the correct choice.
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I have used joins and subqueries (in the where clause) in the past. But when I look at many of the exercises, there's a partially-written #SQL query that uses these features and CTEs and it is difficult to reason about the query and its pieces. Normally, that's when I'd write some exploratory queries to understand how to go from a set of tables to a specific result set (itself a table).
But the table rows seen in the preview may not be easily visible in the query results, which makes it more difficult to see whether one is on the right track.
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It reminds me of when I did my Master's Degree. I was doing Microsoft #SQL_Server through their GUI interface while also taking some MySQL courses through the local community college.
Using the GUI, I'd be in the process of constructing a query and need to look at some information ... for example the structure of a table ... in order to complete the query. In the GUI, everything was modal dialog boxes, so it was *back out of everything* then look for needed data, then go through the steps to get back where I previously was, and enter the query with the acquired information.
Using the mysql commandline, it was ... enter a query to view the table and / or database schema, write your query. If necessary, open a 2nd window and use one for writing long queries and the other for exploration which helps write those queries.
Yes, our web dev instruction was corporation centered, so we used Java Servlets and JSPs in Apache #Tomcat on #Windows ... and SQL Server as the database. I think we used #Apache HTTP Server(also on Windows), but it is possible we did do something with Microsoft #IIS.