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+# Basic Syntax
+
+In this chapter, we will go over the basic SQL syntax.
+
+SQL statements are basically the 'commands' that you run against a specific database. Through the SQL statements, you are telling MySQL what you want it to do, for example, if you wanted to get the `username` of all of your users stored in the `users` table, you would run the following SQL statement:
+
+```sql
+SELECT username FROM users;
+```
+
+Rundown of the statement:
+
+* `SELECT`: First, we specify the `SELECT` keyword, which indicates that we want to select some data from the database. Other popular keywords are: `INSERT`, `UPDATE` and `DELETE`.
+* `username`: Then we specify which column we want to select.
+* `FROM users`: After that, we specify the table that we want to select the data from using the `FROM` keyword.
+* The semicolon `;` is highly recommended to put at the end. Standard SQL syntax requires it, but some "Database Management Systems' (DBMS)" are tolerant about it, but it's not worth the risk.
+
+If you run the above statement, you will get no results as the new `users` table that we've just created is empty.
+
+> As a good practice, all SQL keywords should be with uppercase, however, it would work just fine if you use lower case as well.
+
+Let's go ahead and cover the basic operations next.
+
+## INSERT
+
+To add data to your database, you would use the `INSERT` statement.
+
+Let's use the table that we created in the last chapter and insert 1 user into our `users` table:
+
+```sql
+INSERT INTO users (username, email, active)
+VALUES ('bobby', 'bobby@bobbyiliev.com', true);
+```
+
+Rundown of the insert statement:
+
+* `INSERT INTO`: first, we specify the `INSERT INTO` keyword, which tells MySQL that we want to insert data a table.
+* `users (username, email, active)`: then, we specify the table name `users` and the columns that we want to insert data into.
+* `VALUES`: then, we specify the values that we want to insert in. The order of attributes is the same as in `users (...)`.
+
+## SELECT
+
+Once we've inserted that user, let's go ahead and retrieve the information.
+
+To retrieve information from your database, you could use the `SELECT` statement:
+
+```sql
+SELECT * FROM users;
+```
+
+Output:
+
+```
++----+----------+-------+----------+--------+---------------+
+| id | username | about | birthday | active | email         |
++----+----------+-------+----------+--------+---------------+
+|  1 | bobby    | NULL  | NULL     |      1 | bobby@b...com |
++----+----------+-------+----------+--------+---------------+
+```
+
+We specify `*` right after the `SELECT` keyword, this means that we want to get all of the columns from the `users` table.
+
+If we wanted to retrieve only the `username` and the `email` columns instead, we would change the statement to:
+
+```sql
+SELECT username, email FROM users;
+```
+
+This will return all of the users, but as of the time being we have only 1:
+
+```
++----------+----------------------+
+| username | email                |
++----------+----------------------+
+| bobby    | bobby@bobbyiliev.com |
++----------+----------------------+
+```
+
+## UPDATE
+
+In order to modify data in your database, you could use the `UPDATE` statement.
+
+The syntax would look like this:
+
+```sql
+UPDATE users SET username='bobbyiliev' WHERE id=1;
+```
+
+Rundown of the statement:
+
+* `UPDATE users`: First, we specify the `UPDATE` keyword followed by the table that we want to update.
+* `SET username='bobbyiliev'`: Then we specify the columns that we want to update and the new value that we want to set.
+* `WHERE id=1`: Finally, by using the `WHERE` clause, we specify which user should be updated. In our case it is the user with ID 1.
+
+> NOTE: If we don't specify a `WHERE` clause, all of the entries inside the `users` table would be updated, and all users would have the `username` set to `bobbyiliev`. You need to be careful when you use the `UPDATE` statement without a `WHERE` clause, as every single row will be updated.
+
+We are going to cover `WHERE` more in-depth in the next few chapters.
+
+## DELETE
+
+As the name suggests, the `DELETE` statement would remove data from your database.
+
+The syntax is as follows:
+
+```sql
+DELETE FROM users WHERE id=1;
+```
+
+Similar to the `UPDATE` statement, if you don't specify a `WHERE` clause, all of the entries from the table will be affected, meaning that all of your users will be deleted.
+
+## Comments
+
+In case that you are writing a larger SQL script, it might be helpful to add some comments so that later on, when you come back to the script, you would know what each line does.
+
+As with all programming languages, you can add comments in SQL as well.
+
+There are two types of comments:
+
+* Inline comments:
+
+To do so, you just need to add `--` before the text that you want to comment out:
+
+```sql
+SELECT * FROM users; -- Get all users
+```
+
+* Multiple-line comments:
+
+Similar to some other programming languages in order to comment multiple lines, you could wrap the text in `/*` `*/` as follows:
+
+```sql
+/*
+Get all of the users
+from your database
+*/
+SELECT * FROM users;
+```
+
+You could write that in a `.sql` file and then run it later on, or execute the few lines directly.
+
+## Conclusion
+
+Those were some of the most common basic SQL statements.
+
+In the next chapters, we are going to go over each of the above statements more in-depth.