Swati Iyer from Packt Publishing offered me a free copy of Mastering phpMyAdmin 3.1 in exchange for a review on my blog. I got the book, I read it, and here is the review.
"Mastering phpMyAdmin 3.1 for Effective MySQL Management" is a book about - phpMyAdmin. phpMyAdmin is a tool that most web developers use on a daily basis and know in and out. The existing knowledge about PMA is the hurdle that will make most devs refrain from buying the book; 75% of the information presented in the book was already in my head, having used PMA for over half a dozen years now.
Interestingly, the book still contained things that I didn't know and that are noteworthy. For example, I never heard about the multi-table query generator. Other aspects I didn't know about or only sketchily:
- Detailled restriction of databases to list on the left side
- Split-file exports
- ANSI SQL-validator integration
- Parametrized bookmarks
- All the nitty-gritty details of column transformations
- Table paritioning
- Cron jobs in SQL (!) - events
The last thing that really excited me was the foreign key dropdowns when using the pma-based linked table infrastructure. Surely I had already seen the dropdowns, played around with and used them, but I never knew that one could customize the format. And, what's way cooler, is that - if there are too much items for the dropdown (number configurable) - you'll get a "browsable foreign-table window" popup! Really nifty.
So I learned something new about phpMyAdmin while reading the book. It's a book for lazy train rides when you don't like to switch on your laptop. The book is 35 US$, so with the low Dollar today, it's a cheap buy for Europeans (and probably becoming cheaper over the next months). If you need it, and if you didn't get enough tips by reading this article.