This is a textbook for a Spanish vocational course: it starts with how information is stored and how it is accessed, moves through the relational model with its constraints and views, and continues into design, database engines and the tools of the day it was written. It is aimed at someone who knows nothing and has to end up able to work.
What I took from it
The chapter on constraints is the one I reread. The difference between constraints the model imposes by its own nature and constraints you write because your business happens to work that way is the conversation that saves the most time in a requirements review. When a company says "that value is never repeated", they usually mean it is not repeated today, and those are different statements.
The other useful thing is the order of exposition. It covers physical storage and access methods before showing a single query. That looks old-fashioned and it explains why a report is slow: not because the system is slow, but because nobody thought about how those rows are reached. I use it when explaining to a management team why their month-end report takes the server down.
And the section on database engine architecture, with its levels, supplies vocabulary that is still alive whenever you need to separate what the user sees from how it is stored.
What I left out
The screenshots and the sections on specific tools, which are archaeology. Also the textbook apparatus of objectives and activities, which does not read straight through. And it should be said: it is written for Spain, with Spanish regulation and examples, so what carries over is the substance, not the shape. I keep it for the substance, and for being able to recommend something in Spanish to a beginner.