I tend to find table aliases a step down in readability, and only use them as necessary, because now your eyes have to jump up and down to see where the columns come from.
The aliases don't force you to follow each one through; eyes can do no jumping if you like in either case.
But if you can't infer from the column name which table they will come from, I find having the option to check far more preferable to that of having no way of knowing.
>I tend to find table aliases a step down in readability
I suppose it depends on your database, one of the ones I work with all the time has crazy long table and view names and aliases make resulting SQL more readable.
But if you can't infer from the column name which table they will come from, I find having the option to check far more preferable to that of having no way of knowing.