
Ask HN: Learn databases or programming? - usgroup
I’m going to start teaching local kids programming but the meaning of it is a bit ethemeral.<p>I was thinking of teaching SQL and databases as the first thing before anything else.<p>I’ll be teaching at a coffee shop so I thought we could model the coffee shop as a database. Make reports. Keep records updated. Etc.<p>Rationale is that it’s immediately useful, and you can build on it. Eg module two could be making an interface for our database.<p>What do you think?
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svennek
I think that knowing how to model data is the hardest part of developement.
Many quotes from famous CS people show the same.. I personally like Fred
Brooks "Show me your tables ..."

I stumbled upon a program called Kexi recently. An open source "Access"
working on both windows and linux...

I thik for a learning environment that would be a great tool.

I like the idea of doing the coffee shop, it makes it tangible and a lot of
possibilities for interesting data to collect (membership clubs etc) and a lot
of reporting, that also i used in real life (sales break down by category
etc)..

So I think your plan is sound...

And after you can handle the data modelling learning a language should not be
that hard..

