» MySQL Cookbook

MySQL Cookbook Reviews

Customer Rating:
Summary: Quickstart to MySQL Development
Comment:
I really enjoy cookbooks because of their no nonsense organization. This MySQL book exactly fits that description. Chances are just scanning the table of contents you'll find the question you are asking with the answer and explanation at your fingertips.

Nuggets of information I found quickly include: paging producing HTML output with the mysql client, checking and changing a tables storage engine, working with fulltext searches, summary and grouping query examples, importing data from CSV, exporting in various formats, dealing with auto_increment columns, sequences, deletes, gaps, and so on. Also handling duplicates, detecting, eliminating, working with transactions, and a whole lot more.

The book is mainly geared towards web applications and MySQL. The languages that they cover include Perl, Ruby, PHP, Java, Python. If you're using any of those languages for your web application, it is more than likely you want a copy of this book. It's very quick and painless to lookup how to do something, and not have to wade through tons of information that's not relevant to you.

The target audience for this book is really developers not DBAs, so keep that in mind. If you're doing web development in Ruby, PHP, Perl, Python or Java, you should consider this book. It concentrates solely on the how to do specific things, so you won't get weighed down by too much theory and so on. With that in mind, it's not per se a book on performance, testing, benchmarking and profiling applications in those languages, so if that is what you need, you'll require additional material.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Teasure Trove of MySQL Recipes
Comment: At 900+ pages this book addresses a lot of common SQL tasks. And that's what a good cookbook should do. Not only does it present the SQL queries in the MySQL dialect, it also covers how to pump those queries through Pearl, Ruby, PHP, Python, and Java APIs.
As an added bonus you can actually use this book to learn SQL. I thought the chapter on JOINS was especially well written.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: excellent resource
Comment: This book is
-a great resource for those looking to implement various mysql functions
-a great resource for database programmers
-a trove of information on powerful query and sort techniques

Finding information about the topic you're looking for is a breeze in this book - the chapters are well-organized, and this book has anwered all questions I've posed to it....

The cookbook is a powerful tool to those who know some mysql, and some dB design. I recommend that you use another book to learn basic mysql (or just an online tutorial), and another to learn database design (Navathe).

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Customer Rating:
Summary: True to the Title
Comment: As indicated, this book is true to its title. It is a cookbook, by which I mean it contains a great number of (generally useful) recipes of varying complexity, but lacks detail and analysis that a more focused text would have.

Mr. DuBois and O'Reilly publishing are clearly targeting a wide audience: the recipes range from frighteningly simple (e.g. 3.1, Specifying Which Columns to Select) to fairly sophisticated (e.g. 12.14, Performing a Join Between Tables in Different Databases). The recipes are typically clearly written, with ample supporting code examples and few typographical errors.

I must also note that Mr. DuBois nicely avoids a pitfall many authors (the competence of whom I have to question) in this genre encounter: failure to weave security considerations into the text. While other books often mention security as an afterthought, or worse include code examples featuring disasters like non-escaped strings (hello, SQL injection!), DuBois explicitly points out the need to sanitize input and writes code examples that demonstrate the use of prepared statements in best-practices.

Unfortunately, in other areas he is less thorough. For example, only passing mention is made of the (possible) dependence of FULLTEXT indexes on choice of storage engine. There is an entire chapter on handling duplicate rows, but the oft-needed (and non-obvious) process for removing pseudo-duplicate rows differing only by a primary key field is not directly addressed. Stored procedures, triggers, and other new additions to MySQL are among the least-well understood but most powerful features of the database engine, yet astonishingly little space is spent on them. (I could understand not discussing them in depth as there are other books available, but length did not seem to be a concern anywhere else in this book.)

In summary, the book is an excellent resource for novices and experts alike - but only as a starting point. To return to the cooking analogy, the book at times feels like it is loaded down with recipes on how to add sugar to flour, but omits recipes on how to ice the cake.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Useful book
Comment: This book is useful for anyone looking to find examples of MySQL 4 usage in multiple languages such as PHP, Perl, Java, and Python. It covers many areas that are used in real world applications and is great as a reference material. This book is structured in the Problem/Solution layout of the Oreilly cookbook series.

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