Customer Reviews

SQL for MySQL Developers: A Comprehensive Tutorial and Reference

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Over the last 5 years, I would say I've at least read every book available on MySQL and bought my fair share.

This book is by far the best one available on some of the advanced features of MySQL. It's better than even the Bible and Cookbook series on things like stored procedures, even though it spends too much time on the basics. I loved the large text, but wish there had been more meat on stored procedures, triggers and events (which is why I picked it up to begin with). There are insider knowledge gems sprinkled throughout that will definitely add spice to your SQL, so it's worth a look.

I don't know why even in 2007 authors insist on repeating the MySQL documentation,--it's a MASSIVE amount of wasted space, since anyone using this stuff will be familiar with the online documentation and helpful user commentary. There were a few typos, but that's pretty par for the course. The section on PHP, though, was pretty useless and not particularly good code-wise (in my humble opinion).

One day someone will put out a really advanced cookbook, that doesn't waste space explaining super simple things like "select * from table," but until then it's a great resource. If you can get it at a discount, like on a Borders reward coupon (which they give out like candy) grab it. Clearly, the Europeans still have something to teach us about MySQL! :o))

Van der Lans offers an impressively thorough education in MySQL 5. It is remarkable how much capability is offered for free in the open source MySQL. The book can also be used to learn generic SQL from scratch. Some early chapters give a quick recap, that should be understandable to an experienced programmer, who does not know SQL. If this describes you, the biggest adjustment to learning it might be its declarative nature, as opposed to the procedural ethos of most programming languages.

One striking feature of the book is the extensive explanation of SELECT. This is the key statement of SQL, and you need to be facile with it. Nine [sic] chapters are devoted to SELECT. Gives you some idea of both the power and complexity of the command. Rarely do other SQL books allocate so much space to a rendition of SELECT. Often, they teach you the basic modes of using it, and then you are left on your own. (Gee, thanks!) Whereas here, for example, an entire chapter is about the SELECT HAVING clause, and another chapter is on the SELECT LIMIT clause. Across these nine chapters are enough worked examples that you can fruitfully mine.

Later chapters delve into more specialised aspects of SQL. Sure, these are all significant. But maybe the most useful is the idea of stored procedures and functions. Vital to optimising performance.

Lest this very mass of detail prove offputting, keep in mind the "Reference" in the book's title. You don't have to read it all at once. As you go thru it, you should develop an intuition of what can be safely relegated to a later reading, when you have specific need of those topics.

I bought this product to help my process is learning SQL. There are a lot of bad (or horrible books) that explain SQL. I have bought quite a few of them so I was excited about this book...

I found this guide useful with the command syntax but there is not enough examples or explanations following the SQL commands...

That being said, this book is useful as a very good guide but not to teach the user SQL; to help out with the online SQL information and provide more information than some of the bad SQL books. In this respect the book does a decent job.

For the book I would give 3.5 stars but, I will round up to 4 stars for the Amazon rating...

I don't think this is all that great, but I think the main issue may be the translation job. Everything reads in a roundabout fashion, and 'full stop' is indicated for period, 'Brackets' for parenthesis.

Not horrible, but I've been using an old O'Reilly book I'd bought as a reference for work alongside it. I find the definitions and explanations are more user friendly than the ones in here.

Also, most of the examples in this book are quirky 'trick shots'. I understand they do illustrate the principles, but I'd like to see a lot more real-world examples. They just have nothing in common with SQL statements I've had to write for homework or in the workplace. You don't learn to play pool by practicing trick shots that don't work in a game, amirite?!

I just received the book yesterday. I opened the book, browsed the table of content and immediately noticed one of the topic on "Select" I can utilize directly in my work (as a professional software engineer). I updated my code today in my office. A single statement update replaced a chunk of our existing code and it all works out beautifully.

Never have a book that pay for itself so fast.

If you program SQL and all you use is the stuff you remembered since your college days, buy this book and read. You will be surprised!

Now I have this book over quite a few weeks, I must to say, it well exceeds my expectation. It contains some very detailed descriptions and the written and style is simple, straight forward, and easy to use.

Highly recommended!

In general, the text is clear and well-written. I have come across minor syntax errors and other problems -- errors that are immediately obvious to someone familiar with SQL. Since I am a beginning student of SQL, they weren't immediately obvious to me.

For example, the author tends to present all code in all uppercase. While that's fine for keywords, for which case doesn't matter -- and as far as I can tell, the prevailing convention is to use uppercase for keywords -- it does matter for filenames, when one is using operating systems other than Windows. There was one long script, in particular, in Chapter 4, which failed to work on my Linux system for that reason.

If there were a good errata published online, I would have given this book five stars.

Pretty disappointed with the book. I don't think anyone took the time to edit it or review the translations and context of the translations. I have read many other SQL books that were much easier to understand and were better at explaining complex tasks.

The beginning of chapter 18 starts out: "The opposite of loading data is, obviously, loading data." Is this for real?

I want my money back. I recommend getting a different book. At $40+ this book is not worth half that.