Ken Guest’s online diary

“Mastering phpMyAdmin 2.11 for Effective MySQL Management” by Marc Delisle

This book on phpMyAdmin is written by Marc Delisle, one of the core developers of the application which I think just about any software developer utilising MySQL has dabbled with at the least. I can honestly say that anyone that experimented with phpMyAdmin before reading this book will use it much more thoroughly and more productively afterwards.

This is a well written, easily read, book that is fully comprehensive regarding how to use phpMyAdmin for both casually inserting and maintaining data in a mysql database; checking queries before utilising them in your code; data transformations; and actual database and user administration, such as changing the structure of your databases, collations, creating system documentation, assigning privileges and more.

I scarcely believe this book could be much more detailed, especially as it often has more than two screen shots per page – it is no wonder that I now know much more of what phpMyAdmin is capable of!

The troubleshooting chapter at the back seems invaluable and the chapter covering MySQL 5 additions seems a useful refresher for those of us that may need to be reminded of new functionality present only in that more recent version of MySQL, and after reading this book I fully expect that I shall be using phpmyadmin more and not using either the MySQL Query Browser or Oracle’s SQL Developer as much.

The blurb on the back of the book says that it is for every serious phpMyAdmin user who would like to use this outstanding application to its full power – after reading it I am very much inclined to agree and would recommend it to anyone that uses phpMyAdmin on a daily basis.

Ok, packt sent me another book to review. This time it’s “Object-Oriented Programming with PHP5” by Hasin Hayder.

If I hadn’t read in the Author’s Profile at the start of the book that Hasin is from Bangladesh, and that English is in all likelihood not his first/native language, I would have realised that he does not have a fluent grasp of the English language anyway and this detracts from being able to focus on what he is trying to communicate.

Putting the aspects of Hayder’s grasp of the English language aside, the book is rather good as an introduction to the various technologies that it covers. If you’re already up to speed with OOP then you mightn’t want to bother with the first few chapters; but after that the book covers phpunit testing, design patterns (Hayder uses the Patterns chapter to introduce MVC and later devotes an entire chapter to it), SPL and PDO.

I got a stunning feeling of deja vu when reading the main OOP chapter: it seemed very reminiscent of the online php manual and user contributed notes at php.net – a resource which Hayder makes the occasional reference to.

The book’s section on phpunit testing is rather good as an introduction to that concept; though it does conclude with ten pages of text from the PHPUnit Pocket Guide by Sebastian Bergmann. I have to question the rationale behind this: PPG is available freely online and I think mentioning the website for that version of the book would have been a better thing to do.

I think I will definitely be picking this book up rather often for reference and that it is worth the money (that I admittedly didn’t have to pay).
But what would I do to make the book even better than it already is?

1. I was expecting some coverage of UML for representing classes and interactions between them – not a lot but just enough to be useful.
2. Avoid mentioning topics that are outside the scope of the book – it makes the content appear weak and less comprehensive than it is. I’d simply have a “recommended reading” section or appendix at the end of the book.
3. This may seem petty but it’s actually quite important, especially as regards the environment – don’t place braces in the example code on seperate lines. It doesn’t matter as much when on screen but when printed out that’s a lot of wasted paper/trees.