What’s in This Book
It’s very likely when you use this book that you’ll have an application in mind you’re trying to develop but are not sure how to implement certain pieces of it. In this case, you’ll already know what type of problem you want to solve, so you should search the table of contents or the index looking for a recipe that shows how to do what you want. Ideally, the recipe will be just what you had in mind. Failing that, you should be able to find a recipe for a similar problem that you can adapt to suit the issue at hand. (I try to explain the principles involved in developing each technique so that you’ll be able to modify it to fit the particular requirements of your own applications.)
Another way to approach this book is to just read through it with no specific problem in mind. This can help you because it will give you a broader understanding of the things MySQL can do, so I recommend that you page through the book occasionally. It’s a more effective tool if you have a general familiarity with it and know the kinds of problems it addresses. The following paragraphs summarize each chapter, to help give you an overview of the book’s contents.
Chapter 1, describes how to use the standard MySQL command-line client. mysql is often the first interface to MySQL that people use, and it’s important to know how to exploit its capabilities. This program allows you to issue queries and see the results interactively, so it’s good for quick experimentation. You can also use it ...