Elements of MySQL and Its Environment | 5

To follow the content in this book, you will need some software fortunately, all the software we use is open source, free for noncommercial use, and easily downloaded from the Internet. To coverall parts of this book, you need a MySQL database server,
Perl, and a web server that can talk to MySQL using the PHP and Perl programming languages. We’ll explore four aspects of using MySQL:
MySQL server
We explain how to create your own MySQL installation, and how to configure and administer it.
SQL
This is the core of MySQL use, and the major topic in this book. It’s introduced in
“Structured Query Language.”
Programming languages
SQL is not a simple or intuitive language, and it can be tedious to repeatedly perform complex operations. You can instead use a general-purpose programming language such as PHP or Perl to automatically create and execute SQL queries on the MySQL server. You can also hide the details of the interaction with the database behind a user-friendly interface. We’ll show you how to do this.
Web database applications
We explain how you can use PHP or Perl to create dynamic, database-driven web applications that can publish information from the database to the Web, and capture information provided by users.
HTML is the lingua franca of the Web. Although learning HTML is not within the scope of this book, there are many great HTML guides available, including HTML and
XHTML: The Definitive Guide by Chuck Musciano (O’Reilly). We recommend that you pickup the basics of HTML before reading Chapters 13, 14, 15, or 18.
The LAMP Platform
It’s very common to find web database applications developed using the Linux operating system, the Apache web server, the MySQL database management system, and the Perl or PHP scripting language. This combination is often referred to by the acronym
LAMP, a term invented at O’Reilly Media.
Linux is the most common development and deployment platform, but as we’ll show in this book, you can run all the tools on other operating systems. In fact, we’ll give directions forgetting started on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. Most of the content in this book can be used for other operating systems with little modification.
The Pin LAMP originally stood for Perl, but over the past decade, users have increasingly turned to PHP for developing dynamic web pages. PHP is very clean and efficient for retrieving data and displaying it with minimal processing. If you have to do heavy data crunching after the data is returned from MySQL, Perl may still be abetter choice.
We discuss PHP and Perl largely independently you can pickup one without needing

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