Book Review: Mastering phpMyAdmin for Effective MySQL Management
(Page 1 out of 2)Introduction
Welcome to this review of "Mastering phpMyAdmin for Effective MySQL Management". Although not strictly a PHP book, it's still very valuable to any PHP developer, because phpMyAdmin is often an important part of development, especially during the early stages of database design. phpMyAdmin is the de facto MySQL database tool, and this book will take you through everything phpMyAdmin has to offer. Read on to learn more about this book.
Technical Details
Title: Mastering phpMyAdmin for Effective MySQL Management
Publisher: Packt Publishing
Author: Marc Delisle
Length: 242 pages (19 chapters + index)
ISBN: 1904811035
Website: http://www.packtpub.com/mastering_phpmyadmin/book
The Review
I never knew there was so much to say about phpMyAdmin (PMA), but the 242 pages of this book have proven otherwise, and every little feature of PMA is discussed. Although it's quite an old book (2004), it's still very accurate because not a lot has changed since then. The author of the book, Marc Delisle, is a major contributor to the PMA project himself, and that makes for a really pleasant reading experience, because it's obvious that he knows a lot about it, and everything he explains is done with confidence.
Chapter one ("Introducing phpMyAdmin") starts you off with an introduction to PMA, and its history. This is a typical introductory chapter, and it doesn't contain a lot of information, although the history behind PMA is pretty interesting.
In chapter two ("Installing phpMyAdmin") the author takes you through the steps of installing PMA, and also looks at the basic configuration of PMA. You will also learn how to secure PMA, and use the different authentication types offered. Although I consider myself quite experienced with PMA - I've been using it for several years now - I never knew about the different authentication types, or that PMA supports multiple servers. This multi-server support is really handy, and already I've benefited from this book, and we're only at chapter two yet.
Chapter three ("Interface Overview") will give you a brief overview of all the interface panels in PMA, and the author shows how to change certain interfaces by using the configuration file. This is a fairly boring chapter if you've already worked with PMA, since you know what the interface looks like, but it's a great chapter for beginners who have never seen it before. I quickly skimmed through this chapter, and moved on to the next chapter.
Chapters four, five and six are introduction chapters to using PMA, and if you've already used PMA, you'll probably want to quickly leaf through these chapters. Concepts introduced in these chapters include creating a new database, inserting new rows, editing rows, deleting many rows at the same time, changing table structure, etc. It's still worth looking through these chapters though, since they do contain a few good tips on certain subjects (e.g. BLOB's are explained in fine detail).
Chapter seven ("Exporting Structure and Data") is all about exporting data with PMA, and, unlike most tutorials on the internet, this chapter really takes a look at every option that the export feature offers. The author discusses every export format (i.e. SQL, CSV, LaTeX, XML, etc), and also talks about export compression and more. I've used the export feature a lot, but this chapter still contained a lot of new information for me.
