New Book on MySQL & MariaDB

by Russell Dyer

published: october 07, 2014; revised: september 03, 2017; readers in past month: 98

I’m nearly finished writing my new book on learning MySQL and MariaDB. I have two chapters more to write. I have plenty of other work to do in my job with MariaDB and for my clients at Avocet. However, I’ve written the bulk of the remaining chapters and should finish in about two weeks. It’s being published by O’Reilly media later this year. If you click on the image of the book cover, you’ll be taken to the book on Amazon’s site where you can pre-order it.

I think it’s the best work I’ve ever done in technical writing. It’s well organized, and I think it’s well written. My editor, Andy Oram has helped me greatly in these area. However, the past few years of writing have improved my abilities more than I realized. I’m very proud of this book, and hope we will sell many copies. Yes, I would like that for financial reasons. I mostly want that because I feel good about what I’ve written and hope it will be useful and appreciate by many people. As a writer, being read is the most satisfying aspect of writing. I also hope it will be well received by book reviewers. I’m pretty confident they will.

This book was originally to be just about MySQL. With the growth in popularity of MariaDB over the past year — MariaDB may eventually, completely replace MySQL — we decided to include MariaDB in this book. Both database systems are identical with only a few extra features provided by MariaDB. But that’s enough to switch to MariaDB. When faced with choosing between MySQL which is owned and controlled by an extremely large corporation (i.e., Oracle) and MariaDB which is championed by a small corporation (MariaDB Corp.), I feel that one should choose the latter.

The book is a beginner book, for those learning how to develop databases in MySQL and MariaDB. It goes through the basics of creating and altering tables, as well as inserting, updating, and selecting data — and joining tables and sub-queries. It explains string, numeric, and time functions. There’s also some extensive chapters on back-ups, bulk importing data and application programming interfaces. Each chapter includes exercises for the reader to practice what they learn. At around three-hundred fifty pages, it’s a pretty complete tutorial.

Once I’ve finished writing the remaining chapters, and made any changes suggested by my editor, the book will go through technical review. The technical reviewers will be Sveta Smirnova and Bogdan Kecman of Oracle MySQL, Collin Charles of MariaDB, and my son Kenneth Dyer of Avocet. Kenneth is working with me as a documentation writer and has been working on the documentation this year for TokuTek and Codership Galera. However, he’s still new to MySQL. So not only will he learn more about MySQL in reviewing the book, but he will have a beginner perspective that will be helpful in making final improvements.

After I make the needed changes cited by the tech. reviewers, the book will then to the copy editor who will provide her suggestions on word usage, grammar, and writing style. That’s always useful in helping me to improve my skills as a writer. When I make the changes she suggests, the book will then go to the production department and then will be printed and be available for sale.