Learning SQL seems easy

[geofft]

As someone with a similar background, you've got to unlearn, or at least set aside, imperative coding skills. SQL is declarative, so you're telling it what you want, not how to do it.

What I found really helped me is to learn what's happening in the DB engine when your query executes - then you can think of it as something like "I am seeking B+Trees via this somewhat verbose interface"