Customer Reviews

MySQL Language Reference

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If you are seriously considering purchasing this book, you should be aware that aside from some typical publisher's mumbo jumbo up front, this is a hardcopy format of the online MySQL Documentation already available via the web. The language of THAT work has always been a little tortured; but once you spend some time with it, it does get the point across.

I don't want to imply this book is without value - it isn't. If nothing else, the covenience of having it in this format is worth something - I'm just not sure $40 is the right number.

I first looked at using MySql in a web application back around 2001 or 2. Using it would have required a port of the SQL statements. And I decided not to use it. The application I was porting had lots of statements that used SubQueries, and MySql didn't support these. Yes, I could have re-written all the statements using joins and other methods, but what a lot of work.

As a result, when I was first flipping through this book I found a section - Subquery Syntax. In that section, the first example showed a nested SELECT statement that had four cascaded subqueries. So I sat down in the bookstore and started reading this section. Subqueries took a dozen pages to describe, and included enough information that I found myself learning a lot about subqueries that I didn't know. (I'd point these things out, but then you'd just think I was pretty dumb.)

Then I looked for a few other things that I've had trouble finding with other DB books: Reserved Words (go try to find the reserved words in Access for instance) they are the last couple of pages in Chapter 2. Replication - it's there. Everything I looked for was there.

Let's net this out. This book is $40 (that's list price, but you know better than that). The software is ZIP - just go to www.mysql.com, click on developer and download the version you want (Linux in a bunch of versions, Windows, and several versions of Unix). The price is still ZIP. You want to upgrade to the next version, yup, cost is ZIP. Less than $40 is your total investment.

This is a great reference book, but note that practically all of this info is available online. That being said, when I develop I like to have the written book handy. It's a well organized and well bound softcover.