7: In which I show off the book sitting next to me.

Blogged on Saturday, December 9th, 2006 by Rachael. Filed in Randomness.

Here I am, sitting at my desk at home, after having tried again (unsuccessfully) to resuscitate Tim’s laptop. I have merely confirmed that its hard drive is, indeed, FUBARed. I’m not sure what to do with it next; I might try and reformat it, but that means I need to create an XP boot disk, which I don’t yet know how to do. Oh, sure, I can find out. I can learn from the infinite wisdom that is Google University, but I’m not up to it yet. That darned hard drive is driving me insane, slowly and methodically.

So anyway. I’ve been reading through a fellow NaNo-er’s book, which is really quite interesting and exciting, and I decided I needed a short feed-reading break. One of the blogs in my reader (I heart Google Reader, btw) has this silly meme in it, which I’ve seen before, and I thought what the heck! It could be fun.

The directions are as follows:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open it to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next four sentences on your blog, along with these instructions.
5. Don’t fudge and go digging through your bookcases in the other room looking for a super-intellectual smartypants book! Just pick up whatever’s closest. You know, arm’s length and all that.

Closest to me is this book: MySQL in 10 Minutes, by Chris Newman.

Some SQL-based databases include a wider range of operations that can be performed on two query result sets. These are MINUS or EXCEPT, in which the result contains only the rows from the first result that do not appear in the second, and INTERSECT, in which the result contains only rows that appear in both results.

MySQL does not understand these keywords, but there are ways to perform these operations using other techniques.

Performing a MINUS

There you go. Now you know something about MySQL that you didn’t before! How about that.
I’m not even far enough into the book to understand what the heck that was all about. But I’m sure that as long as I remember that that one operator thingy is usually placed between two queries, I think I’ll be just fine.

Let me know in the comments if you do this one. I’m up for a laugh. ;)