I was talking to day to a keen programmer (not even at uni yet - but running a very good looking web site and already writing code for customers) and he was saying that he liked my C# notes (free to anyone who asks by the way). He suggested that I take the chapters that I've written and add a section on database integration to make a proper book.

The more I've thought about this, the more I like the idea. When I was learning to program you wrote your program output into a file, either text or binary depending on the application. When I teach programming now I tell students how to do this, along with dangerous things like serialisation and sensible things like XML. But in the future just about all the storage behind your program will be a database of some kind. Things like the linq project bring this home even more strongly to me. So perhaps in the future we will regard programming as something which sits on top of a database. And so maybe an introduction to programming should cover the subject like this.