Along with MySQL's popularity has come a flood of questions about solving specific problems, and that's where this Cookbook is essential. Designed as a handy resource when you need quick solutions or techniques, the book offers dozens of short, focused pieces of code and hundreds of worked-out examples for programmers of all levels who don't have the time (or expertise) to solve MySQL problems from scratch.

The new edition covers MySQL 5.0 and its powerful new features, as well as the older but still widespread MySQL 4.1. One major emphasis of this book is how to use SQL to formulate queries for particular kinds of questions, using the mysql client program included in MySQL distributions. The other major emphasis is how to write programs that interact with the MySQL server through an API. You'll find plenty of examples using several language APIs in multiple scenarios and situations, including the use of Ruby to retrieve and format data. There are also many new examples for using Perl, PHP, Python, and Java as well.

Other recipes in the book teach you to:

• Access data from multiple tables at the same time

• Use SQL to select, sort, and summarize rows

• Find matches or mismatches between rows in two tables

• Determine intervals between dates or times, including age calculations

• Store images into MySQL and retrieve them for display in web pages

• Get LOAD DATA to read your data files properly or find which values in the file are invalid

• Use strict mode to prevent entry of bad data into your database

• Copy a table or a database to another server

• Generate sequence numbers to use as unique row identifiers

• Create database events that execute according to a schedule

• And a lot more

MySQL Cookbook doesn't attempt to develop full-fledged, complex applications. Instead, it's intended to assist you in developing applications yourself by helping you get past problems that have you stumped.

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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