Rating:  - Very useful.
This book has been invaluable to me, and although I have my gripes against the tedium of some of this book, overall it's become a permanent member of my web design shelf. Having this book on hand has allowed me to dive into the dark realms of PHP message boards and wikis and come out with my own server-based applications.
Rating:  - best version yet
I have purchased each version of this book and this is by far the best version yet. It was totally reorganized from the previous versions, and adds a great deal of new content covering the new features triggers, stored procedures etc. if you only buy one book on MySQL this is it.
Rating: - Easy to read and good referecne
DuBois book is quite a well written book for Mysql beginners. Highly recommended!!
Rating: - great reference book
This book will not teach you how to work with MySQL. It is, however, a terrific reference manual on the ins and outs of just about every feature (Although I wish coverage of stored procedures and triggers had been more complete). I've worn one out entirely and had to buy a second.
Rating:  - Verbosity atrocity
As a guide to MySQL it seems to be fairly complete, although the index is not very good or helpful. Basically you have to begin from the beginning of the book and read it to the end to make sense out of it - it isn't much of a reference work because it is very difficult to navigate, and difficult to find things in the midst of Paul DuBois's endless waffle.
The worst thing about this book, though, is that not only is it very thick and heavy, but it is also exceptionally verbose and contains very much pointless waffling. The book's length could have been reduced by about two hundred pages if Paul DuBois had employed a competent editor to remove the fluff.
Because of the grind involved in tackling Paul DuBois's verbose, tedious and distracting writing style, I give this book three stars.
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