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 "Sho

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..