Posts Tagged ‘managing’

This book greatly assisted me in preparing for the 70-218 exam. It went well beyond the scope of the certification objectives and offered valuable insight into concepts I need to know in my daily administration.
MCSA Managing a Windows

The title is not all together indicative of what the authors try to accomplish in this book. The book attempts to be both a tutorial and a reference for programmers and administrators. The book consists of four major parts. The first part is the Introduction, which contains chapters on MySQL in general, installation on Unix and Windows, SQL for MySQL, and general Database Administration. This is accomplished in less than eighty pages which makes for brief explanations, limited illustrations, and examples. The second part is the MySQL Administration. This part has chapters on Performance Tuning, Security, and Database Design. The third part is MySQL Programming. The chapters’ topics include general database applications, Perl, Python, PHP, C API, Java, and extending MySQL. Part four is the MySQL Reference. SQL syntax for MySQL, MySQL data types, Operators and Functions, MySQL PHP API Reference, C Reference, and Python DB-API are the chapter topics included in this part.

The authors do not assume that the reader is knowledgeable about relational databases in general, SQL, or the related topics. For example, the chapter on SQL on MySQL does not just describe the subset of SQL-92 that MySQL supports, but rather it contains a tutorial on the SQL for the commands that MySQL supports. Chapter seven on Database Design contains a tutorial on taking a database to third normal form complete with Entity-Relationship diagrams, unique identifiers and relationships. In part four, the PHP chapter contains a mini-tutorial on PHP and a complete PHP application. While the level of thoroughness is nice in the sense that you do not have to refer to other volumes to comprehend the subject, it makes for some very intense reading because of the size of the book versus the topics covered.

Overall, I like the book as a general tool, however there are certain omissions, for example: there is no reference phpMyAdmin or WinMySQLadmin. These tools are very easy to use and helpful in working
Managing and Using MySQL