I'm having difficulties understanding how a intermediary table works.
The example on page 168 makes sense and is simple to understand (the books and authors example), but when I tried to apply it to my design it didn't work out.
This is my intended design: I have a 'users' table. Each user has a course/s that he's taking, 'course_id.' The name of the course is in the 'courses' table, and the intermediary table is 'users_courses.' I want to extract the 'user_id' together with the 'course_name.'
users: user_id (pk)
users_courses: user_id (pk) course_id
courses:
course_id (pk) course_name
Is this the right way to go? It doesn't make sense to me, because I can't enter multiple values for the same user in a case where he's taking more than one course since it's going to create duplicate keys.
How do I make it work?