A better way to describe my progression was that I was conversationally fluent at the time I checked this book out. When I got my hands on SQL For Dummies, it allowed me to go through the book, note what I did not know, and beg our resident programmer to explain it to me in the context of our team’s current projects.
The spirit of the idea that I taught myself SQL is accurate. I never sat down in a classroom or hired a tutor. There is no SQL-intensive computer science on my college transcript and no SQL learning programs were offered in my first job experience. What I learned came mostly through my initiative and follow-up effort. For many, this is what ‘teaching yourself’ means and I happily use the expression as it suits my purposes.
But I didn't teach myself anything, really. It’s more like I just sat down one day and I could program. I suspect I learned SQL a lot like the way I learned English when I came to America. I arrived in an environment where I knew some of the basic vocabulary but didn’t really understand complete ideas. All I knew was that what I heard did have an equivalent in a language I already understood (Japanese). Each day, I tried to make some sense of the little patterns and correlations of the new language. Eventually, exposure enabled mimicry and successful mimicry fed natural curiosity. As I grasped the basics, I started up in first grade and began the long process of formalizing my budding conversational fluency into the formal definitions of grammar, spelling, and punctuation.
In the same way, I turned my intuitive understanding of the database into the specific syntax of SQL code. SQL For Dummies was, without a doubt, a huge help. It helped me translate a concept I understood – the Excel spreadsheet – into one I grasped only abstractly – the relational database. It gave me the vocabulary I needed to ask the right questions and formalize my ‘conversational fluency’.
To conclude that all of the above means I taught myself SQL is fine, I suppose. I won't argue. But learning rarely works in such a neatly defined way. Those who ‘teach themselves’ might actually have many more teachers than those who are taught by one teacher in a traditional setting. The self-taught simply learn a tiny bit from a huge range of sources and find ways to stitch all the loose threads together into a full understanding of the topic at hand.
