“Beginning MySql” – Book Review

Here’s a book review I did on amazon.com.
Check out more of my reviews at my amazon.com profile page.

Overall, I love this book, because the authors build your knowledge of databases from the ground up.

Before I got my hands on this book, I knew only a limited amount about databases. Now, I understand advance concepts (like foreign keys, transactions and optimization) and can design, implement and maintain my own simple relational database management system.

This is a thick book that took me about 2 weeks to finish and it would have taken even longer if I decided to follow through with all the “Try it out” sections, exercises and useful examples.

“Beginning MySql” covers the majority of MySql 4.1 by using the definitions of syntax and options as their main teaching tool throughout most of the chapters. This makes MySql easy to learn since you can reference the definitions as a cheat sheet when you’re implementing a database design.

One thing that I noticed is that they need more proofreading. Every now and then, you’ll encounter a typo or wrong information but this is expected since the authors warned of this in the introduction.
Example, page 299: “However, bitwise operations support calculations up to 64 buts”.

The best part of the book, is appendix C. It briefly covers MySql 5 but they introduce you to Triggers, Views and Procedures while updating you on MySql new standards. For exmaple, MySql 5 supports foreign keys for all the table engines, not just for INNODB.
If you’re the type that has a hard time reading documentation online, then I would strongly recommend this book. Otherwise you might be able to learn MySql using Youtube and the MySql homepage.

Note: Since this book only converts version 4.1 of MySql, you need to checkout the on-line documentation for changes in MySQL 5.

You can buy the book for less than $10. Link below.