Chapter 1Introduction
An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.
I turned down my first SQL job.
Shortly after I finished my college degree in computer and information science at the University of California, I was approached by a manager who worked at the university and knew me through campus activities. He had his own software startup company on the side that was developing a database management system portable between various UNIX platforms using shell scripts and related tools such as awk (at this time, modern dynamic languages like Ruby, Python, PHP, and even Perl weren’t popular yet). The manager approached me because he needed a programmer to write the code to recognize ...
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