Audience

This book is primarily for two classes of readers. The most obvious is the reader interested in using MySQL from either a database administration perspective or from a database programmer perspective. In addition, anyone who wants to learn about relational database administration and programming without paying out the nose for a license from one of the big guys will find MySQL an excellent starting point.

From a database administrator's perspective, we cover the basic methods of creating and managing databases and tables in MySQL. We go beyond the simple tasks and provide performance tuning and troubleshooting tips to help you make sure your MySQL applications are running at their best. We assume no prior knowledge of SQL or relational databases.

Database programmers will find that we have covered all the major programming interfaces from the most popular client/server and web programming languages. When we cover the interface for a particular language, we assume the reader has a basic grasp of the language in question. For example, in the Java™ chapter, we assume the reader knows how to write basic Java applications, and we show how to make those Java applications talk to MySQL databases.

The immense popularity of MySQL on the Web has made it natural to provide a focus on CGI programming with Managing and Using MySQL. Web developers should therefore find this book useful in describing how to drive their web sites with a MySQL database. For these chapters, very little CGI knowledge is needed, but we still assume that the reader is familiar with the basics of the programming language in question.