Rating:  - Excellent reference book
The book MySQL is an excellent book. My employer uses MySQL for many of our database needs and, being relatively inexperienced with databases, I had to be brought up to speed quickly and with good, accurate knowledge. This book is that resource. The coverage includes everything from setting up databases and tables to new users and permissions. When I have a question I almost always go directly to the book as opposed to the help pages that came with the database itself. The clear wording and solid explanations along with the excellent examples make it an extremely handy reference to have around at all times. I find myself referring to the book quite often for the finer points in creating SQL statements to do what I need them to do. The examples in the book cover almost every situation I've needed them to. Very rarely do I have the need to go elsewhere or seek additional resources for an answer. If you are going to be developing applications that interact with a MySQL database (whether your language is Java, C, PHP, or PERL) you need this book. It covers all of the functions and common tasks as well as database administration, security, and maintenance and repair. This is a great book and I would highly recommend it to everyone working with MySQL databases.
Rating:  - This is an outstanding book
If you need to learn how to use MySQL you cannot go wrong with this book. This has been one of the best values for the money of all the technical books I've bought in the past few years. I bought it when I had to come up to speed very fast with a web application which uses MySQL. I have found everything I needed so far, from information about administration issues to helpful programming examples. The prose is well-written and easy to follow and although he covers basic stuff it's not in a way that is irritating to people with experience of other database systems.
My colleagues keep walking off with it - even if they are using some other database but find the docs & 3rd party books they have are inadequate. That's a testament to what a useful tool this book is.
Rating: - Getting ready to crack her open
I work for a Tech school and this book comes highly recommended to me, besides the book "PHP and MySQL Web Development 0672317842". I am half way through this book and it VERY much complements "PHP and MySQL Web Development". I am not trying to advertise this but if you are like me and love / have to learn to create PHP- Web/Intranet/Database driven-apps/ you will not go wrong with this book. I find that having more then one perspective on the above subjects makes it easier to learn, that is why I am mentioning both books. Hey PHP is free and so is MYSQL. They will both run on Windows or Unix. If you are starting out and attempting to build "Dynamic/Interactive Websites" on a basic open platform/server environment then PHP & MYSQL should be in your scope of learning...
Rating: - Excellent, well written book
Few computer books are a pleasure to read. This one is. DuBois has written an accessable, clear introduction to mysql, the high performance rdbms.
My only two problems with it are that he doesn't cover python programming (C, PHP and Perl) and there is little coverage of InnoDB (transactions). MySQL is changing so quickly that this book will soon need an update.
Rating: - Best MySQL book out there!
Most of the other MySQL books aren't really MySQL centered-they use it as the backend for a language (like PHP or perhaps it's a CGI book that has a chapter or two on dbs, and they use MySQL). This is the *definative* book on the db-the stamp of approval from the create mind behind MySQLAB (...) is on it.
This book has a little bit for everyone. If you wanted to just wet your appetite, you really don't need much more than the tutorial and the PHP chapter. With these two-you can pretty write a web-based app immediately.
Once you want to tune and optimize your application, you better check out the chapters that deal with the details of queries and indexing-the guts of the MySQL SQL. Also, the Perl chapter gives you a more robust language than PHP, and the C chapter gives you something if you want a blazing fast app.
Finally there are the administration chapters-they give you background on the admin tasks.
One suggestion I'd give though, make sure you read the MySQL docs. They're pretty good about details. Also, for PHP-get the PHP docs, the MySQL functions are really handy. If you want to use perl, get the Perl DBI book from O'reilly-I found it indispensable.
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