Recently Swati from Packt Publishing sent me free copy of Mastering phpMyAdmin 3.1 book. I was very interested in reading it once because i never took the time to find more about advanced features of the software that i am using almost on day to day basis and second because i was interested to find out how Marc Delisle (author of the book) will go about explaining all the functionality. In my opinion while explaining how to such software it is very easy to fall into trap of teaching people MySQL, rather then teaching how to use the actual software.
Well i have to say, that after reading the book i was nicely surprised. Marc focuses 100% on phpMyAdmin, no unnecessary MySQL or web development lessons is a big plus. One of the things i liked most was chapter about Authentication & Security. Some realy advanced stuff there. Author explains phpMyAdmin configuration options that probably most people (including myself) never heard about, shows how to setup for multi servers and makes some interesting notes about security.
Next, there are chapters explaining phpMyAdmin core functionality: creating databases, selecting data, manipulating data, modifying tables and so on. Probably everyone who ever worked with phpMyAdmin did not need to know that stuff as it’s very intuitive, but what i liked about it was that here and there Marc drops tips and hints that depending on what you are doing might improve your work.
Like with everything there are more advanced features that come into core functionality and this are: Relational system and multi table operations, everything with big enough screen shoots. Actually screen shoots in each chapter are big plus for whole book they contain only important information and are big enough to see all the details.
One thing i did not like was chapter about export, where Marc explains how to export data to many different formats (csv, pdf, excel, word, latex, xml, ods, odt, yaml codegen and few more). In my opinion just a few formats would be good enough.
All in all it’s a good book, pretty well written with nice screen shoots (like i already mentioned), really informative and straight to the point, just as i like it. I rate it 9/10.
If you are still not sure about this book you can grab free chapter here
2 Comments on "Mastering phpMyAdmin 3.1 book review"
Nice Post, It’s really informative! Thanks
It nice to see book dedicated for phpMyAdmin . I was looking for one of these books. As per you review it looks like its worth buying. I will also buy one of this copy.