"But seriously, does anyone really think that a beginner should learn NoSQL before learning SQL?"
Hmmmm - back in the day, I learned to use hashes, tied hashes, and BerkleyDB way before learning to use SQL and SQL libraries.
Hmmmm - back in the day, I learned to use hashes, tied hashes, and BerkleyDB way before learning to use SQL and SQL libraries.
But it's also overkill for many problems requiring persistent storage. If I were teaching a programming beginner how to save data for a program to persist across invocations of the program - there are tools I'd reach for before saying "well, first we need to install MySQL or Postgres, then the db abstraction libraries, then we need to talk about ORMs … ". Pedagogically, going from variables to hashes to tied hashes to NoSQL is a relatively direct progression - at least to me.
Having said that - there's an enormous amount of PHP ( and Perl and …) code out there showing beginner programmers getting shit done with minimalistic but workable understanding of SQL.