Hello All!
> Can someone recommend an intro MySQL book. I'm looking for a
> book with info on MySQL
Yes, as others have said, the Paul Dubois book is -excellent.-
> Teach Yourself MySQL in 21 Days ...SAMS..by Maslakowski.. (Takes you
> from Ignorant to Working Project).
Avoid it like the PLAGUE.
A 'printed disaster'.
I've been reading tech books for 25 years and have *never* before seen
such a poor piece of work.
Have I made my point? :) No? Read on!
The sample perl is -wrong-. The scripts flat out -fail- -wc compilation.
As printed it simply literally does not work. The CD does not match the
book, and -both- are -wrong-.
The sample HTML *was* literally copy/pasted from FrontPage (<meta
name="GENERATOR" content="Microsoft FrontPage 4.0">). Totally -filled-
with font and width foolishness that takes twice as much printed space as
necessary and that I had to -squint- through to figure out what was
supposed to be going on.
Other comments I sent to the author:
====
> > (The HTML on the CD was, as gently as I can put it, fairly hysterical. :)
> > The idea of a few lines of INPUT... TEXT... with no FORM /FORM tags just
> > broke me up. :) But that was less important to me because I know enough
> > about HTML to easily figure it out, and the book was far more correct in
> > those aspects.)
> >
> > The more serious problems for the SQL-newbie start with Listing 21-2 on
> > page 406, AddCustomer.pl. There is a 'my $dbh' line, and several 'do'
> > lines. But a few lines down there are several '$dbi->do' lines. There is
> > no 'my $dbh', and I don't know exactly what kind of line to add for that.
Bear in mind that I'm reading that as a raw virgin newbie. I spent -hours-
trying to figure out what I was doing wrong.
> > At this point I -KNOW- I am reading untested software. Some errors I
> > figured out, but the most -important- aspects of this script, the GRANTs,
> > is totally uncommented, and I can't get it to run at all, just lots of
> > lines of errors in the server logs that I won't bother including here.
> >
> > There is a line that says '# Create the user in the MySQL database', but
> > there is no reference to -opening- the mysql.user database, that I 'think'
> > should be there. I think that's where the my->dbi should be.
> >
> > Then there's the 'print Location:' line that references 'CustomerAdd.html'
> > that as far as I cn see does not exist, and I can't quite guess what it's
> > supposed to mean. That \nURI at the end of the line sure looks weird, not
> > the way I've ever used Location. And this appears to be not the correct
> > use of Location. The 'print Location' should be the -last- thing sent to
> > the user, after which the script should end. The client will -not- receive
> > anything sent after that.
Yes, the line says literally (wrapped):
print "Location: http://CustomerAdd.html\nURI:
http://CustomerAdd.html\n\n"; ;
> > There's a line on page 396, 'Quantity INT, NOT NULL,' clearly an error
> > showing that this is untested. I seem to recall other minor errors but
> > can't find any at a quick glance.
====
No errata has ever been posted to samspublishing.com even though I was
told a year ago that it'd ready 'in a few days.'. I will obviously never
buy another Sams book either.
Check the author's info at http://www.samspublishing.com/authors_sams.cfm.
Not there? Oh.
Biggest waste of $40 and hours or reading I ever spent in my life.
Nuff said?
To be fair, I did learn how to create a database, < import some data, log
in to the server, and do a few simple queries. But that's it.
Have a :) day!
jb
--
jim barchuk
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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