At 9:18 AM -0700 8/16/99, Derick H Siddoway wrote:
>Paul,
> I just got my copy of O'Reilly's MySQL book, and I'm quite a bit
>underwhelmed. How does it compare to the book you're working on?
I knew this would come up sometime...
You realize that any author will prefer his own book to others, so that's
something to keep in mind. For that reason alone, I'm hard pressed to
give an objective answer. Plus I'm only partly finished.
The O'Reilly book has a dual focus, since it deals with both mSQL and
MySQL. I'm dealing only with MySQL. If you want a comparative analysis,
then the O'Reilly book will give you more insight into the way the two
databases stack up. I don't really compare MySQL with anything else
(which will probably disappoint people who want me to bash Oracle and
the other big guns), so I think you'll get more MySQL coverage in my
book. I'll also cover DBI and PHP more than the O'Reilly book does.
I don't go into database design as much as the O'Reilly book.
How's that for a non-committal answer? The best way to compare them is
to get both and see for yourself. Unfortunately, no one will be able
to do that until it comes out, probably late December or January. I
don't expect we'll see the same kind of three month slippage that we saw
with the O'Reilly book. (I realize people were disappointed by that
delay, but to be fair, O'Reilly did this to get a better book out. I can
say that the book you hold in your hands now is much better than the
manuscript I reviewed back in, uh, February, I think it was.)
I guess one thing I could say is that if you like the manual, you will
probably like the book. There will be some overlap, of course, but the
book will have a lot more narrative and examples than the manual.
Apparently my editor took some of the chapter drafts to Linux World in
San Jose last week. If anyone on the list saw the drafts and cares to
comment, feel free!
--
Paul DuBois, paul@stripped
