When I attended LinuxWorld in Boston, I met Russell
Dyer in the press room. He was there for Unix Review, I
believe. He was sitting right across the table from me, the
table where all the journalists had their laptops hooked up to
file their stories, and everyone was chatting and working
simultaneously. I must say, it was quite impressive to see
reporters laughing and kidding around and then read their very
knowledgeable and fact-packed articles a few minutes later.
The other memorable thing was that when there was a fire
alarm over the loudspeaker, none of them left the media room.
Only I got up and dutifully played fire drill. A cynical
bunch. And by the way, they were absolutely correct. There was
never any real danger, as it turned out. I've wondered ever
since at what point they might decide it was worthwhile to
stop typing and get out of danger, but at the time, I was too
shy to ask. All I could do was admire.
Anyway, Russ mentioned he was writing a book on MySQL. I
asked him to let me have a look at it when it was published,
with the thought of doing a review. He followed through when
it was published in May, and I immediately saw it was over my
head altogether, so I sent it to Steve McInerney who, as
MathFox's right hand man, helps keep Groklaw running smoothly
behind the scenes. Steve liked the book very much, with one
quibble, and he has now written a review for us.
As for Steve's comment about my alleged "nagging," I will
just point out, as women the world over will confirm, that
women only "nag" when their very legitimate and reasonable
requests are ignored.
: )
Just kidding, both of us. We get along wonderfully, which
is testimony to Steve's good nature. I've been so fortunate
with Groklaw that both MathFox and Steve volunteered to help,
because they are both very even-tempered and pleasant. And
very skilled. Steve jokes all the time, which comes in handy
now and then, I must say. And Mathfox is unflappable. The
truth is they have never once refused to help me when I asked
for help. Thank you both so much for all you do for Groklaw
and for me.
*******************************
MySQL in a Nutshell By Russell Dyer First Edition May
2005 Publisher: O'Reilly Series: In a Nutshell ISBN:
0-596-00789-2 352 pages http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/mysqlian/
I'm sure most readers of Groklaw are aware that Groklaw
runs on Linux servers, web services provided by Apache, the
main code base being the Geeklog Weblog Software, written in
PHP, and finally, all the data stored in a MySQL database. A
classic software LAMP stack. All of this is then hosted by the
very generous folk who run Ibiblio . Thus a review on
a book about MySQL seemed quite apropos.
As one of the developers and maintainers for the various
additions and add-ons we use at Groklaw, I have a fairly
strong personal interest in new and useful books about PHP and
MySQL. You're never too old to learn something new! Plus, as
the Nutshell
series are designed to be quality and complete reference
books, saving time so as to deal with Pamela's latest "feature
request" aka "nag", is always a positive. ;-)
So, having had a slow skim read of the entire book, I'd
like to pass on my thoughts and observations of this quite
excellent addition for anyone who programs with and for MySQL
databases.
The book starts much like any other book on any one of
dozens of titles on a wide variety of products. Introduction,
How to Install, Basics. It's not until we get to chapter 4,
"SQL Statements" that the fun and value of this book begins in
earnest.
A word of warning: This is not an SQL primer book. You are
required to know and understand SQL already, but as an SQL
reference in line with the nutshell ethos, this chapter is
brilliant!
All the commands are clearly laid out, with all the options
and even useful examples! If only Geeklog was documented so
well. ;-) One example of this clarity is with the "ALTER
TABLE" command. The explanations cover about 4 pages and with
several examples covering the major types of table alterations
via this command. Lovely!
As can be seen from the O'Reilly web site, there are
extensive chapters on all the various functions available as
well. I did laugh at the PHP API chapter being Chapter 13. It
seems so delightfully ironic.
Unfortunately this is also where the book does not live up
to the full promise of its title. The book is a programmer's
reference, it is not a system or database administrators
reference for MySQL. The chapters dealing with the command
line tools and daemons are little more than rehashes of man
pages.
I personally would have at least liked to have seen better
and more detailed explanations of the mysql command line tool.
We have to do some moderately funky tricks to extract certain
types of data from Geeklog due to the Ibiblio architecture
(Observation, not Criticism). How to do the weird and
wonderful methods of using the command line mysql tool would
be most useful. More examples, please!!
In summary, if you program with/for MySQL databases, then I
do recommend this book as an excellent reference guide into
all things programmy about MySQL. It certainly won't be
spending a lot of time of my shelves gathering dust!
If you're a systems or database administrator you may need
to keep looking.
If anyone does discover a nasty bug in the SQL code and/or
usage with Groklaw and my changes therein in future, well, now
you know which book author to blame!
Enjoy and Happy Coding! |