A couple of weeks ago I received a book from PACKT Publishing titled "Mastering phpMyAdmin 3.1 for Effective MySQL Management" written by Marc Delisle, with the request if I could read it and write a review about it. Why not ? I haven't used phpMyAdmin in whole my career so I might as well read about the tool everyone around me is using. And since phpMyAdmin is also bundled with Zend Server, it can only benefit my day-to-day job.

He talks about the contents of the book (chapters on the phpMyAdmin interface, working with MySQL on the command line) and some of the handy bits of information he learned along the way.

There are many reviews of this book already, so I will mostly describe how this edition is different from the previous one. In short, though, I would say that this version is much more readable, and is still the best book to buy if you want a book on phpMyAdmin. The reviews I've read here all agree with my own assessment that phpMyAdmin is a surprise '" right when you think you know what it does, a book points out a load of stuff you didn't know it did.

He breaks it into two sections - the things that have gotten better (like the removal of some unneeded items and he inclusion of some of the more minor features) and some things that, unfortunately, have not improved (such as the increased size of the table of contents and the addition of other, too large screenshots).

I've been using phpMyAdmin since... Hmmm... Well... The times before I used to code in PHP. So when offered to review Mastering phpMyAdmin 3.1 by Marc Deslisle, I didn't expected to learn anything new, but I was wrong.

He recommends the book to both beginners and experts to the software (more so to the beginners, obviously) and mentions some of the topics it covers - everything from a basic introduction to the interface out to using the SQL validator and advanced bookmarking.

In short, my review is this: overall, the book detailed everything I can think of (and more) about phpMyAdmin - I learned about some features in phpMyAdmin that I was not already aware of. I would ask for less screenshots, more how-tos and less 3rd-person speech for the next revision, but if there are any questions I have about phpMyAdmin, the answer is in this book.

The review gets into more detail about the book - its structure, the wealth of content in it (including some unknown features) and a few things that could have been better. Kae mentions a few places where the author "forgets that the reader does not know the subject" and gets a bit too technical too fast. The screenshots, while good in moderation, overpowered parts of the chapters and made them harder to follow.

The book is described as:

Mastering Regular Expressions quickly covers the basics of regular-expression syntax, then delves into the mechanics of expression-processing, common pitfalls, performance issues, and implementation-specific differences. Written in an engaging style and sprinkled with solutions to complex real-world problems, Mastering Regular Expressions offers a wealth information that you can put to immediate use.

This new edition is the third release for the book.

Although not strictly a PHP book, it's still very valuable to any PHP developer, because phpMyAdmin is often an important part of development, especially during the early stages of database design. phpMyAdmin is the de facto MySQL database tool, and this book will take you through everything phpMyAdmin has to offer. Read on to learn more about this book.

The review starts with aon overview of the various chapters - from the introduction, to the installation, an interface overview, and using and exporting your data, and much more.

His opinion overall is that the book provides more than enough information for both beginner and advanced developers to find what they need about phpMyAdmin.

When Tobias and I created the CMS book series for German publisher Hanser, we also wrote the first series title on Mambo/Joomla!. We afterwards sold the translation rights to Packt Publishing. They already had a Mambo book, but liked our material so they took the last two thirds of the book, translated it and thereby created "Mastering Mambo".

The book covers topics like creating custom layouts, builing multilingual sites, using a forum, using the Mambo extensions, and how to develop your own modules...]]> Thu, 08 Dec 2005 08:00:59 -0600