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Ask HN: Learn databases or programming?
I’m going to start teaching local kids programming but the meaning of it is a bit ethemeral.
I was thinking of teaching SQL and databases as the first thing before anything else.
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.
Rationale is that it’s immediately useful, and you can build on it. Eg module two could be making an interface for our database.
What do you think?
- svennek 9y agoI 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..