Mongers,
Does anyone have a recommendation for a good database theory book? I'm an intermediate level MySQL user (Yes, that could mean just about anything) and familiar with joins, foreign keys, dependencies and similar concepts, but I'd like to read an academic text to learn ER modeling and other fun stuff. For example, I've always wondered what "tuples" and "normalizations" are, and how to translate hierarchical and network models into tables.
Preliminary browsing on Amazon has resulted in extended confusion. Texts "recommended" by the "experts" (such as Date's "Introduction" and Elmasri's "Fundamentals") are simultaneously panned and lionized by readers, not to mention outrageously expensive.
Additionally, in a belated attempt to clean the "off-topic" stain from this posting, and because I am genuinely interested:
"Mind Share" and "Short-Listing" have been very hot topics lately. I was thinking that one strategy for boosting Perl would be to make it easier to learn for GUI types. This, I think, would help Perl win a larger share of the open-source web development arena where PHP is gaining every minute. Non-CS types like me were nursed on JavaScript, became curious, dabbled in CGI, MySQL and then started making a living out of it. If the early CGI books of the day didn't give so much attention to Perl, I might never have learned it. Certainly, at first glance, the Perl code looked downright hieroglyphic. Now that I regularly use Perl, PHP and JavaScript in my work, I can certainly appreciate Perl's incredible text-munching faculties, its adaptability and its friendship with Unix. But it could learn a few things from the other two.
What's great about JavaScript is that everyone with a web browser has a JavaScript interpreter. Some browsers have monumentally handy JS consoles with descriptive error messages and line number references. PHP will tell you what line it croaked on, even in a CGI context. Perl has Apache give you the (rather useless) bad news "500 Server Error". Yes, CGI::Carp brings Perl to par with PHP. But if you can't even print "hello world", how much further are you going to dig? If you're a command-line type, none of this applies, but if I'm not mistaken, an ever-growing share of programmers are web programmers. If PHP was designed to be a convenient, straightforward, easy-to-learn, (clunky, bloated), web-centric language, why wouldn't a web-head start there and stay there?
What would be great is if Perl had a "browser" like JavaScript has a browser. The shell doesn't count. I'm talking about some kind of GUI that could mediate Perl, guide one through the first few baby steps but then continue to be helpful and productive for power users. It could interact with the OS like a web browser interacts with the web. I believe there is a Perl IDE for Mac called Affrus which is a step in the right direction, but I'm thinking more along the lines of a script-builder that would still deal in plain-old text but would integrate drag-and-drop file browsing, perl docs, pipe and redirection selection, macros, debugging and script execution into the GUI.
I use the shell and Perl (together) quite often on my Mac for filesystem chores that would be simply ridiculous to attempt in PHP. But it's not altogether convenient or natural (or, perhaps, necessary) to switch from a GUI (even if it's BBEdit all day every day) to a CLI in order to cd through six levels, chmod and curse my typing errors just to run a one-time utility script.
Anyway, my thinking is that if Perl could play to its strength as a FOU (friend of Unix) more effectively, programmers would get into the habit of adding it to their bag of tricks, similar to how JavaScript is in the "common bag of tricks" now for web developers. A web developer might be laughed at for calling himself a "JavaScript programmer", but knowing no JavaScript would be far worse. Similarly, knowing no Perl but trying to hack text filters, cron jobs and filesystem groomers with PHP instead of Perl should be considered just as tragic as choosing VBScript over JavaScript, but somehow it isn't. Just a thought.
Thanks,
Bogart
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