To be honest I didn't understand this article. First of all the example doesn't cover the first condition "All records that contain the word "the" in the company name", but it's fine because no german company has that in name, irrelevant however. To me this is the way to go:

select

customerid, companyname, country

from

customers

where

--companyname LIKE '%the%'

--AND

companyname NOT LIKE 'A%'

AND

country='Germany'

Plain and simple.