What you’ve been doing so far is using a program called MySQL, and you’ve been talking to that program using SQL, the Structured Query Language. And you’ve already written a couple of SQL queries:

mysql> select * from user;
...
mysql> select Host, User, Password from user;
...

Both of those commands are SQL queries, or just SQL. The “Structured” in SQL comes from the idea that you’re accessing a relational database, something with a lot of structure, and you’re using a language that itself is very structured. You’ll soon see that SQL is very easy to learn, mostly because it’s very predictable. That’s why you can look at a command like this and figure out what it does:

mysql> select User, Password
         from users
        where first_name = 'Dirk'
          and country = 'Germany';