The folks from Packt Publishing recently sent me another of their books to review.  If you’re not familiar with Packt, they’re a relatively new book publisher who are steadily building up quite a range of technology books on open source software, normally written by people involved or close to the software being written about.  They’re like a modern day equivalent to the old O’Reilly of the 90’s, only (imho) with higher quality

A Bit About Packt

Mastering phpMyAdmin 2.11 for Effective MySQL Managementby Marc Delisleis the third edition of this book, and it follows the usual pattern of Packt Publishing books.  The book has clearly defined objectives on the cover, and it follows a clear progression of its chosen subject from start to end.  It is well presented, with a clear layout and clean page design that makes it easy to read.  The book also includes a sizeable index, something no decent technical book can be without.

I’m really pleased to see that Packt are now providing example code online for download, as well as online errata for the book.  Many of their earlier books reviewed here on Planet PHP have been criticised for not doing so; it’s great to see Packt improving in this area.

No matter which Packt book you pick up, don’t let the use of language be the reason you put it back on the shelf.  Most Packt books are written and reviewed by folks who don’t speak English as their first language.  Once you get used to it, it’s never really a problem, but it’s worth pointing it out because if you browse their books at your local bookstore, it might put you off at first.

Introducing phpMyAdmin

If you’ve never heard of it, phpMyAdmin is (imho) one of the most important open source projects for the LAMP stack.  phpMyAdmin provides a web-based admin interface for MySQL, making it extremely easy for folks new to the LAMP stack to start working with databases, and a very convenient way to avoid firing up the MySQL command-line if you need to check something or make changes to your databases.

It feels like phpMyAdmin has been around forever.

Unfortunately, it looks that way too at times.  In the post Google Maps world of AJAX enabled slick and efficient user interfaces, phpMyAdmin’s usefulness can be hampered by its Web 1.0 UI, and by its continued reliance of manual configuration instead of a Wordpress-like admin panel.  Don’t get me wrong, phpMyAdmin is a good tool without equal atm, but it’s a workmanlike and functional tool that younger folks used to the Facebook world find a bit long in the tooth.

About The Book

Marc’s book is aimed both at folks new to MySQL and phpMyAdmin as well as experienced developers such as myself who aren’t aware of the advanced features that have been added over the years.  The full chapter list is:

1. Introducing phpMyAdmin
2. Installing  phpMyAdmin
3. Interface Overview
4. First Steps
5. Changing Data
6. Changing Table Structures
7. Exporting Structure and Data
8. Importing Structure and Data
9. Searching Data
10. Table and Database Operations
11. The Relational System
12. Entering SQL Commands
13. The Multi-Table Query Generator
14. Bookmarks
15. System Documentation
16. MIME-Based Transformations
17. Character Sets and Collations
18. MySQL 5.0 Features
19. MySQL Server Administration
20. Troubleshooting and Support

The first ten chapters cover the basics of using phpMyAdmin.  If you’re new to phpMyAdmin, these chapters will be very helpful to you, and if you’ve been using phpMyAdmin for years, there’s still little bits in here that you might not have been aware of before now.  I particularly like the way that these chapters often refer back to the configuration settings in phpMyAdmin’s config file.  However, towards the end of this section, the material starts to feel a bit rushed, as if the author himself can’t wait to get onto the clever features of phpMyAdmin that have yet to come.  If you’re completely new to MySQL, you might find the end of this section to be a little light on detail.  I hope the next edition of this book beefs these chapters up a bit.

Like most people I know, my use of phpMyAdmin over the years has tended to stick with the basics: creating and browsing tables.  I confess, it’s partly because I’ve found the phpMyAdmin UI to be more and more clunky as time has gone by, a throwback to the days before Google showed us just what could be done with Javascript and AJAX.  So the second half of the book, which looks at the more advanced features of phpMyAdmin, were ones I found very educational.  I had no idea, for example, that phpMyAdmin now includes an AJAX-based Designer tool, or that I can use phpMyAdmin to generate PDF documentation of my databases.  I found these chapters to be very detailed and informative, although again towards the end of the second half of the book, the chapters began to feel a little rushed in places to me.

Conclusion

I have several new starters joining my team in June, and it’ll be interesting to see whether or not they find the book useful as they find their feet in their first job doing PHP web development.  One thing’s for sure: I’ll have no hesitation in leaving this book out for them to read.

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