Unit 11 - Assignment 13

My experience with Unit 11 was somewhat frustrating. I continue to have problems accessing the UA CBT / VCT online tutorials from home and I ran into problems getting Webmin up and running. Nevertheless, these issues again helped me develop "character": persistence, patience(?!) and faith that things will/can work out if you don't give up! My trouble-shooting / problem-solving skills are getting a work-out with this course.

Regarding the stated objectives for the Unit (compare and contrast CLI and GUI approaches to creating databases, tables and users; learn more SQL including join commands), once I got into Webmin, I felt like I was moving through easily enough.

The CLI gives me a sense of control, knowing what is actually happening when I'm creating a table, etc. I had fun(!) working with the different commands and seeing something happen when I executed a command. Nevertheless, it can be quite tedious and if you make a "tiny" little typo, it can take awhile to figure out where you went wrong and get it fixed / typed in correctly.

The GUI approach is convenient and fairly intuitive.

Regarding particular SQL commands, the join commands aren't intuitive for me. I have to look at examples and/or draw out the tables to see how the different join commands work. In general however, I don't think SQL is too difficult although I have to keep a reference of some sort handy (like the W3Schools SQL tutorial's Quick Ref table) to remind myself of the commands. It would take a lot of frequent use before would feel like I could be fluent in that language.