SELECT

A database table is just a spreadsheet. Every row is one thing, which for us is one dish, and every column is one fact about it. Everything on this card is pulling from the same dishes table:

name             station  price
Bifteki          grill    18
Baklava          pastry   7
Melitzanosalata  salad    16
Loukoumades      pastry   9
Souvlaki         grill    11
Dakos            salad    14

SELECT is how you ask for the columns you want, and FROM is how you say which table to pull them from. That's the whole idea. Everything else is just built on top of it.

SELECT name FROM dishes;

name
Bifteki
Baklava
Melitzanosalata
Loukoumades
Souvlaki
Dakos

If you want more than one column, you list them out with commas in between, and they come back in that same order.

SELECT name, price FROM dishes;

name             price
Bifteki          18
Baklava          7
Melitzanosalata  16
Loukoumades      9
Souvlaki         11
Dakos            14

And when you want every column, you don't have to type them all out. A * means all columns.

SELECT * FROM dishes;

Rows come back in no particular order, and every result is itself a table. Every lesson after this one is really just you learning new ways to shape that table before it lands in front of you.