Learning Mysql
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- Preface | xvii PART I
- Introduction
| Saied Tahaghoghi I thank Hugh for inviting me to collaborate on this project (and for the countless other ways he’s made my life more interesting Santha Sumanasekara for helping me to setup my first ever Linux box and introducing me to MySQL and PHP so many years ago; my various teachers and mentors for painstakingly showing me the way and my friends and colleagues for helping me maintain an appearance of sanity. Most of all, I thank all my family for their constant kindness, support, and prayers I’m especially indebted xvi | Preface to my wife, Somayyeh, for patiently enduring for so long my claims that, The book’s almost done!” Hugh Williams I thank Selina Williams for being always patient, even-tempered, encouraging, and ready to listen while I slaved away on yet another (and maybe my last) book project. Thanks also to Lucy and Rose for letting Dad work upstairs day after day, and to Mum and Dad for the lend of the Winnebago in the paddock while I bashed out a few of the more technical chapters. But most of all, thanks Saied for agreeing to take up the reins and finish the book after I moved to Microsoft you’re one of the best men I know. Last, another thank you to Andy Oram; you’re a very patient guy whom I’ve learnt a lot from. Preface | xvii PART I Introduction CHAPTER 1 Introduction MySQL (pronounced My Ess Cue Ellis more than just the world’s most popular open source database as the developers at the MySQL AB corporation (http://www .mysql.com) claim. This modest-sized database has introduced millions of everyday computer users and amateur researchers to the world of powerful information systems. MySQL is a relatively recent entrant into the well-established area of relational database management systems (RDBMs), a concept invented by IBM researcher Edgar Frank Codd in 1970. Despite the arrival of newer types of data repositories over the past years, relational databases remain the workhorses of the information world. They permit users to represent sophisticated relationships between items of data and to calculate these relationships with the speed needed to make decisions in modern organizations. It’s impressive how you can go from design to implementation in just a few hours, and how easily you can develop web applications to access terabytes of data and serve thousands of web users per second. Whether you’re offering products on a website, conducting a scientific surveyor simply trying to provide useful data to your classroom, bike club, or religious organization, MySQL gets you started quickly and lets you scale up your services comfortably overtime. Its ease of installation and use led media analyst Clay Shirky to credit MySQL with driving a whole new type of information system he calls situated software”— custom software that can be easily designed and built for niche applications. In this book, we provide detailed instructions to help you setup MySQL and related software. We’ll teach you Structured Query Language (SQL, which is used to insert, retrieve, and manipulate data. We’ll also provide a tutorial on database design, explain how to configure MySQL for improved security, and offer you advanced hints on getting even more out of your data. In the last five chapters, we show how to interact with the database using the PHP and Perl programming languages, and how to allow interaction with your data over the medium most people prefer these days the Web. Download 4.24 Mb. Share with your friends:
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