sql

I bought this book after reading the reviews. I wanted to learn mySQL for a specific project and since I have about ten years Unix knowledge I thought it was about time I learned an 'add-on' skill like databases. However, I feel that if this book is supposed to be THE book for the absolute beginner, then I've been short changed. 90% of it is written very clearly, but an important section which would prove tremendously useful for beginners like myself fails. The subject of creating a username / password is skimmed in early chapters by refering you to contact your database administrator. For some reason, its not until near end of the book do you get some guidance which I still failed to perform correctly. I bought this book thinking I'd not need to speak to a DBA in order for me to create a simple database (or to use the sample one's that I ftp'd from the publishers server). However... you do need to know someone with some DBA skills, even if the help costs you a coffee...

Thus, excellent book, but I'm only giving it 3stars since its strictly not for the absolute beginner... but nice try though.

This book is not for beginners, or at least not for those coming from the GUI world without command line experience. Paul makes heavy use of the command line for his examples, and the book in fact contains a large amount of reference content on the command line tools you can use.

That said, the majority of the book is written in a well explained fashion, even the reference part at the end has lengthy explanations, so you will always find what you need. The reference section would be the ideal place to look at for type info, function parameters, etc. if the book would not be that heavy, but the precise explanations would not be possible otherwise.

This book tries to be everything for everybody, which is hard to accomplish. The first section provides an introduction to SQL, but there is also significant info for system administrators and a huge amount of pages on programming with C, Perl and PHP in connection with MySQL. If you are a beginner, and you are not interested in having your own server, or writing C programs, then this book might not be the best choice. However, if you would like to have a broad overview with details wherever you need, this book is advisable.

I give it 4 stars due to lack of info on the Java APIs. This is the best mySql book on out there!! I have a couple of others and sometimes they conflict. The other books don't tell the whole story like how different table types impact certain features - this book does and it always seems to be right. Buy this one and leave the others behind.