I started with a book too. But it was 1996, and the distro was Yggdrasil, and the book was a printout of all the man pages. I used it for a Prolog programming course, so that I didn’t have to go to the university and use their computers. Of course, then I discovered the joys of different flavors of Prolog.
The database app in LibreOffice, based on the Firebird database engine, can do all that.