First, both the syntax and the way querying is generally presented in textbooks, lead you to think that your task when querying is to display one unnamed table. The author objects to each of those four words.
Second, many people have found querying with SQL terribly difficult. Even experts find SQL hard to create and read. Do not be surprised if an analyst struggles to understand his/her own SQL. It is impossible for users to understand any but the simplest SQL.
Third, SQL practice suffers from the notion of a "correlated query" -- which has a monolithic subquery that is executed repeatedly via looping, once for each value of a candidate row picked by an outside SELECT.
The book has much more to say on the topic of SQL before going on offer relational algebra (built on top of SQL) as a n alternative.