Just released by Wrox: Expert PHP and MySQL by Andrew Curioso, Ronald Bradford and Patrick Galbraith.

For once, an “Expert” book where you not only can, but must take the title seriously. This book is choke-full of information, examples and best practices written by some of the foremost experts in their respective fields. All of the authors clearly have …

 
 I'm an advisor, investor and board member to several startup software companies including Revolution Computing, Pentaho and most recently Erply a new Software as a Service (SaaS) company.  One of the common threads I look for is the opportunity to disrupt a large market.

One of the things that made MySQL successful was its use of open source technology to disrupt the multi-billion dollar database market.  In Silicon …

When I started looking into managing hierarchical data I found a lot of short articles that provided bits and pieces of the big picture, but nothing gave a good in-depth review of everything I needed to know to handle hierarchies.

One trend that began to develop was that the best information on the subject was coming from Joe Celko, a rather prolific author/speaker on all things SQL.

Joe Celko has a book in publication called SQL For Smarties, and this book had some basic information on handling hierarchies, which he followed up with Trees and Hierarchies in SQL for Smarties, a truly excellent book on the subject.

This book is not for the faint of heart, but it really is a must-read for those who are looking to handle hierarchies in SQL.

The book only addresses MySQL once, and while in that section it repeats Joe's opinion of MySQL not being a real database, users of MySQL 5 can rest assured that the stored …

Many people know me as a nginx web server evangelist. But as (IMHO) any professional I think that it is really rewarding to know as much as possible about all the tools available on the market so every time you need to make a decision on some technical issue, you’d consider all pros and cons based on my own knowledge.

This is why when I received an email from Packt company asking if I’d like to read and review their book on Lighttpd I decided to give it a shot (I usually do not review any books because I do not always have enough time to read a book thoroughly to be able to write a review). So, here are my impressions from this book.

First, when I received the book, I was in doubt: how such a small book could cover so flexible and multi-purpose piece of software like …

Inspired by the Arctic Dolphin's scary movies, I dug out some reading advice that I made during the MySQL Developers meeting in Riga.

Jack Kerouac, On The RoadMap, a fictionalized autobiography of a senior engineer on a cross country bohemian odyssey after failing to deliver 5.1 GA for the fifth time.

Ken Kesey, One flew over the cuckoo's nested query. A story of love and madness involving a quiet Engineering department. When Jeffrey McMurphy, a convicted felon who's faking insanity to escape a prison sentence, is sent to the Database Group asylum, life changes instantly for the other guests.
A subtle tragedy involving a marketing planner, a virgin junior engineer, and a swordfish develops inexorably, leaving the …

As part of an internal programme at Sun, I am a “SEED mentor” for another Sun employee (not a former employee of MySQL, but what we Sun Dolphins call Sun Classics). He is called Alok and lives in Bangalore, and sadly, our schedules crossed so that I couldn’t meet him when I was at our Bangalore offices in July. So I am mentoring someone I’ve met only over phone — but we’re getting along just fine.

Two of the topics we’ve discussed recently are blogging and books. So after hanging up after our 9 CET 12:30 Indian time mentoring session, I got the idea to combine the two: write a blog entry about the books I recommended Alok.

One thing Alok is contemplating at the moment is the degree to which he should spend time on developing his business skills vs his engineering skills. That’s a familiar topic for many of us in …

A picture says it all. Special offers at a FrOSCon books booth.
For how long is an IT book in its prime?

Apparently High Performance MySQL, 2nd Edition is selling quite well — I’m not sure exactly how well — because we’re preparing for a second printing. This makes me very happy. I don’t think they anticipated going back to the press for quite some time.

The book fluctuates between sales rank 1000 and 2000 on Amazon during the day, and has reached as high as 600 or so. This is just phenomenal. The O’Reilly team was psyched when it broke 5000, and so was I — but now we’ve stayed under 2000 for a long time (except when Amazon sold out of it). Frankly I’d have thought that for a niche-market book like this, we’d have been in the 10,000 range or something like that.

Clearly we (the authors, editors, publisher, etc) have done something right! This is a great feeling.

Thanks for sending errata, by the way. I have just completed proofreading the whole …

As you probably know, I recently finished writing a book with a few co-authors. I kept notes along the way and wanted to describe the process for those who are thinking about writing a book, too.

Update: see the followup post for more of the story, including my editor’s responses.

I think it’s important to be objective; my purpose here is to help prospective authors get a feeling of what it’s like, and it’s not all good (but I’d encourage people to do it anyway). Hopefully I won’t come off as sounding peeved at anyone or like I’m trying to put people down. I’ll have a lot to say about what went right and wrong, and how it helped and hindered the process.

Please excuse the rambling nature of this post. I’d love to …