While MySQL has turned up among high profile users such as Yahoo!, NASA and the U.S. Census Bureau, the rising popularity of this open source database is especially keen among users with little database experience. These days, even a small organization or web site has uses for a database, and MySQL is an obvious choice. Affordable and easy to use, MySQL packs the power, speed and efficiency that enable it to rival expensive, proprietary database solutions. Yet, even if you know the basics, anyone without practical MySQL experience--novices and skilled DBAs alike--might stumble over common database-related tasks. Fortunately, there's a sensible shortcut. MySQL Cookbook provides a unique problem-and-solution format that offers practical examples for everyday programming dilemmas. For every problem addressed in the book, there's a worked-out solution or "recipe"--short, focused pieces of code that you can insert directly into your applications. But MySQL Cookbook is more than a collection of cut-and-paste code. You also get explanations of how and why the code works, so you can learn to adapt the techniques to similar situations. The book covers a lot of ground. Solutions for typical MySQL dilemmas range from simple ways to find all records that contain a given string, to more difficult problems, such as finding matching/non-matching records in two tables. Whether you use MySQL on Unix, Linux, Windows or the Mac OS X platform, the book will show you how to:

• Import data from external sources

• Export data for use by external programs

• Access MySQL from your web server

• Use scripts with MySQL to read queries from a file

• Access MySQL from within client programs that use Perl, PHP, Java, Python and other languages

• Construct queries that solve commonly-occurring questions

• Interact with the server

This learn-as-you-go resource will help users of all levels exploit MySQL more fully. MySQL Cookbook supplies you with an armory of ready-made techniques for specific problems so that, even if you're an experienced MySQL user, you don't have to write everything from scratch.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 28 Ratings

True to the Title - 2008-03-11
Reviewer Rating:
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.

excellent resource - 2008-04-10
Reviewer Rating:
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).

My son the computer tech was right--once again. - 2009-08-06
Reviewer Rating:
I need to learn about MySQL for my small business. My son the computer tech said this was the book I needed to get me up to speed quickly. He was right. It's concise, apparently complete, and easy to understand, even if the subject is a bit mind-bending at times. Without a book like this, I wouldn't enjoy the learning experience; it would be less pleasant than another knee surgery.

This book is highly recommended by a guy who has read a lot of instructional material in a 40-year career that included service as a part-time college instructor...and by his adult son whose computer library cost his dad thousands of dollars.

Quickstart to MySQL Development - 2008-11-13
Reviewer Rating:

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.

Teasure Trove of MySQL Recipes - 2008-09-27
Reviewer Rating:
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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