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While I get the impression that the author knows the subject well, he has not been well served by the translation, which is quaint at best and very confusing at worst - two examples "Extraordinarily frustrating was the attempt to install both packages under Windows", and "However, if you wish to allow, for example, that in the book database a book could be entered that had no publisher, then you should do without NOT NULL".

In Part II the author addresses database design, SQL and using PHP as the programming language; not in three separate chapters, but interspersed with much cross-referencing. I have used PHP and MySQL for a few years now, but I found the presentation very confusing. This was not helped by the code examples not matching the resulting output, or that were incomplete. I also worry about code examples that show poor practice - one example was issuing a query within a for loop to retrieve records with keys 1 to 6.

Part III romps through Perl, Java, C, C++, Visual Basic C# and ODBC. These chapters are mainly how to install the components and to get a simple "Hello MySQL" example running. These fall into the chasm of too much information for the expert and insufficient for the novice.

Not recommended.