One of the core skills of a good developer is to be able to understand the requirements of a project/feature and come up with data models accordingly. After that, they'd design a database schema from it and use it in the application. But the sad fact is that many developers today are not serious about this skill. Developers are keen to learn frameworks like Laravel, Ruby on Rails, or Next.js and get comfortable with the ORMs but they lack the foundational skills in data modeling. Most of the time, except for a few senior developers in a company, there are no other developers in the entire company who can do the data modeling of a new project or efficiently update existing schema while implementing a feature. As a result, they cannot easily move into senior roles, and companies also have to depend on a handful of developers. When we interview developers at different companies, this problem emerges more clearly. Given any data modeling task, developers get stuck, build the wrong structure, or surrender altogether. Most of them complain that they start working on a project after the database design has already been done by the seniors in their office. What's the solution? Well, I think the first step is to get serious about it and decide to put effort into it. There are tons of tutorials online on this topic but most of them are written to increase SEO rankings, not to teach you. They never go too deep, so reading them will give you a high-level idea, but you won't actually learn much. So my suggestion would be to read a good book cover to cover. One advantage of books is that the author will take you step by step from easy to difficult topics, take enough time to explain the concepts, give various practical examples, share some of their personal experience, etc. Now you may ask, which book should you read? Well, you can ask senior developers you know what books they recommend, or ask colleagues if they have any favorite books on this topic. I can suggest two books here: 1. Database Systems Design, Implementation, & Management, 13th ed (Coronel C., Morris S.) It is a proper textbook, so you will get a lot of detailed information and lots of examples. The authors explain each concept in depth. The book is long but the chapters on data modeling and database design are very good. Once you finish those chapters, you can keep reading the whole book, but if you think you need something a little easier then you can skip the remaining chapters and learn SQL from the following book. 2. Head First SQL, O'Reilly Media (Lynn Beighley) This book is a bit dated, but like any Head First book in the series, they teach SQL with lots of pictures, diagrams, and fun examples. You may think, how is a technical book so interesting! Funny or not, this book will give you a solid foundation in SQL. If you recommend any other books or resources on this, feel free to share with us in the comments 💪🏻
