• Alison – tutorials
• Codecademy – tutorials
• edX – tutorials
• Hacksplaining – tutorials how to protect your code from hacking and exploits
• JDoodle – on-line IDE, including Online SQL Editor
• MIT OpenCourseWare – free courses
• MIT App Inventor – facility to create apps for Android OS
• Slashdot – news
• TechCrunch – news
• TechRepublic – news
• Tutorialspoint – tutorials
• WhatIs – tech dictionary and encyclopedia
• Udemy – paid courses

Although these instructions refer to the 2016 version, the instructions are similar for previous versions. You can also also query YouTube.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that by 2024 there will be a 18.8% increase in the field of “Software developers, applications” with a median annual income of $100,080 and 20.9% in “Computer systems analysts” with a median annual income of $87,220 as of 04/14/2017 (https://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_104.htm). This means an average increase of 19.85% in fields like data analysis (SQL), programming and server management in both open source and proprietary environments. It also means that learning programming or system analysis (networking, server management, etc.) can secure yourself a good livelihood. Make the best out of the next seven years.

Microsoft has released a new batch of books for free.
https://mva.microsoft.com/ebooks

Also take a look at my first post of books released by Microsoft.

When writing SQL or other programming languages, we all know how messy our code can get — mixing lower and upper case, placing commas in all the wrong place and many other issues all over the code.

It is good practice to have code that others can easily read. In other words, we want a clean code using a constant format — not like the code below.

/* written on 05/16/2017, by JDOE */
select distinct table01.field01, table01.field02
, table02.field03,table02.field04
from table01 inner join
table02
	on table01.field01 = table02.field01
	; -- messy code

This is where open-source plug-in Poor Man’s T-SQL Formatter (http://poorsql.com/) by Architect Shack (code available at GitHub) or other utilities come in handy when writing T-SQL. After running the utility, the code above is organized as shown below.

/* written on 05/16/2017, by JDOE */
SELECT DISTINCT table01.field01,
	table01.field02,
	table02.field03,
	table02.field04
FROM table01
INNER JOIN table02
	ON table01.field01 = table02.field01; -- clean code

I will start using Poor Man’s T-SQL Formatter (http://poorsql.com/) when teaching future T-SQL courses.