I learned it alongside learning about how Rails' ORM worked and it made it much easier to stay interested (I still hate hand writing SQL though). It had the nic

I learned it alongside learning about how Rails' ORM worked and it made it much easier to stay interested (I still hate hand writing SQL though). It had the nice benefit of helping to really understand what was going on in the ORM and at the DB layer. At that point you can safely avoid abusing the ORM and creating terrible queries that might otherwise look readable and concise at the application layer.