Rating: 
Summary: Good Intro
Review: Like Julie Meloni said, "Teach Yourself MySQL in 24 Hours" is designed for beginners. I picked it up with the intention of learning the basic MySQL commands so that hopefully I could write PHP scripts that interact with databases. Much to my surprise, this book not only gave me all the commands I could ever want, but it also provided chapters on using PHP and Perl with MySQL. One other plus, Meloni wrote this book at almost half the size of other introductory texts.
Rating: 
Summary: I ordered this book but never recieved it
Review: Please remove the reminder from my page
Rating: 
Summary: not bad, but...
Review: The "hours" are pretty short. Many chapters involve about 10 minutes of reading. The information is good, and the descriptions are clear, but there's really no reason to purchase this book, when the New Riders MySQL book includes a tutorial that's just as easy to follow, and a wealth of additional information. Julie Meloni, according to the back cover, has contributed to Webmonkey columns...this book would've made an excellent Webmonkey tutorial but is a little light for a book-length project.
Rating:
Summary: not bad, but...
Review: The "hours" are pretty short. Many chapters involve about 10 minutes of reading. The information is good, and the descriptions are clear, but there's really no reason to purchase this book, when the New Riders MySQL book includes a tutorial that's just as easy to follow, and a wealth of additional information. Julie Meloni, according to the back cover, has contributed to Webmonkey columns...this book would've made an excellent Webmonkey tutorial but is a little light for a book-length project.
Rating:
Summary: not bad, but...
Review: The "hours" are pretty short. Many chapters involve about 10 minutes of reading. The information is good, and the descriptions are clear, but there's really no reason to purchase this book, when the New Riders MySQL book includes a tutorial that's just as easy to follow, and a wealth of additional information. Julie Meloni, according to the back cover, has contributed to Webmonkey columns...this book would've made an excellent Webmonkey tutorial but is a little light for a book-length project.
Rating:
Summary: Great Introduction to MySQL
Review: The book delivers what the author promised. It provides an introduction to MySQL, databases in general, and basics for using PHP and Perl with MySQL. The length of the chapters and the entire book are moderate. Not so much that you are overwhelmed but with substance for the beginner. This is a good book to get someone started. For the author - if there is a second edition remember that there are many Pythonists out here too! :-)
Rating: 
Summary: Nice tutorial
Review: When a friend of mine asked me to evaluate this book she said, "Hey, Mike, you teach computers. Would you please look this book over and tell me if I've just wasted my money."This was a bad day and I almost answered, "I don't teach computers. I teach people to use them." I'm glad I didn't because she then said, "You know, I like teaching books written by women. They're easier and they aren't filled with bad geek jokes." I mentioned this conversation to my wife and she muttered something about male egos and of course women are better teachers. This isn't universally true but the incident caused me to look over my bookshelf and notice that a disproportionate number of introductory titles were authored by women. With the computer field having a hugely male membership, why would so many of my computer texts be written by women? I'm not complaining. Elizabeth Castro has helped me through HTML. Robin Williams got me thinking design. Molly Holschlag has a couple of titles on my shelves, and so on. To this list I'm glad to welcome Julie Meloni. Her writing is straightforward, her handling of the material shows a clear, methodical progression in her introduction of concepts. She takes a lot of the mystery out of the subject of MySQL database implementation. This is a nice beginner's tutorial that should give a solid foundation. Starting with database theory she progresses through the design process and onto using the database. As she says, "This is not rocket science." And if one takes the time to work through the examples, he or she should come out with a working knowledge of MySQL. As with all the Teach Yourself in 24 Hours Series books, this is a tutorial and not an encyclopedic reference book. For reference you will have to consider buying something fatter. I like "MySQL" by Paul Dubois. So if you like to learn a subject through graduated lessons, this is a good buy, costing about half what some other MySQL books cost. Of course you do lose something with the lower cost. I noticed a couple of errors in the example code. The technical editing is just not as good as you will find from some other publishers, like O'Reilly and New Riders. From what I've read in other reviews that seems to be a problem with Teach Yourself books in general. However, if the reader is paying attention such mistakes shouldn't pose too great a problem. I would have also liked to have been able to download the example code from the web. But since I didn't buy the book in the first place, I really can't complain.
|
