Sams Teach Yourself MySQL in 21 Days

Rating:
Summary: Typos galore! Don't waste your money.
Review: Typos galore

I know I'm throwing fuel on a bonfire, but this book [stinks]!

HUNDREDS of errors and misinformation. I tried to return the book but found out if I open the CD it is non-returnable.

The only reason I opened the CD was to get a file that WASN'T EVEN ON THE CD!

Next time I will read the reviews on Amazon first.

Rating:
Summary: Stopped counting typos and errors at 100
Review: Unbelievably poor proofreading. I started seeing a couple of typos in the first chapter, and decided to highlight them so that I could let the publisher know, but now my book has more highlighting than I did in any of my college textbooks! I stopped counting once I reached 100 errors and typos. Some major ones, too, such as "DROP tablename" (page 84) which should be "DROP TABLE tablename". That's a pretty important command, and the editor (author?) can't get it right? It's a good thing that I had O'Reilly's "SQL in a Nutshell" book for reference because otherwise I would be completely stuck.

It's one thing to have a book that is fluid and easy to read, but when dealing with programming and technical learnings, the code and examples are, in my opinion, more important than if it's another "MySQL for dummies". If the code isn't right, the book doesn't work. When I have a question about MySQL, now, I refer to ... rather than this book (which I paid money for).

Bottom line: Wait for the 3rd edition. There are multitudes of better MySQL books out there until the publisher releases at least a 3rd edition of this book (with all typos corrected).

Also, if 95% of the reviews for this book are 1 or 2 stars, and two reviews give it 5, why does it have an overall score of 3 stars? That's not right.

Rating:
Summary: Too poor and illogical.
Review: What this book is and what this book is not?
This is not a book neither mysql, nor sql language, nor database management.
Examples are left unexplained, some critical topics are left uncovered, others are left to author's intuition, chapters are bad organized, there is a sense of non-logical organization all over the book. If this is your first book about mysql, you will "teach yourself" nothing about mysql. If not, you simply don't need this book. I suggest to spend money for this book to buy an ink cartridge and some paper to print out the official mysql manual. This book has definitively no mean.