Introduction - Learning MySQL and MariaDB - page 5

Other Topics and Other Publications
MariaDB provides online documentation of theirsoftware that generally applies to MySQL
software. Oracle provides extensive online documentation for the MySQL server and all of
the other software it distributes. The documentation is organized by version of MySQL.
You can read the material online or download it in a few different formats (e.g., HTML,
PDF, EPUB). In PDF and EPUB, you can download a copy to an ereader. I maintain a web-
site that contains some documentation and examples derived from my topic, MySQL in a
Nutshell (2008). Other people have also contributed examples and other materials to the
site.
In addition to the topic that you're now reading, O'Reilly publishes a few other MySQL
topics worth adding to your library. O'Reilly's mainline reference topic on MySQL is writ-
ten by me, MySQL in a Nutshell . For solving common practical problems, there's MySQL
Cookbook (2006) by Paul DuBois. For advice on optimizing MySQL and performing ad-
ministrative tasks, such as backing up databases, O'Reilly has published High Performance
MySQL (2012) by Baron Schwartz, Peter Zaitsev, and Vadim Tkachenko. At MySQL, Inc.,
I worked with the writers of both MySQL Cookbook and High Performance MySQL , and
they are authorities on the topic and well respected in the MySQL community.
O'Reilly also publishes several topics about the MySQL application programming inter-
faces (APIs). For PHP development with MySQL, there's Learning PHP, MySQL,
JavaScript, CSS, and HTML5 (2014) by Robin Nixon. For interfacing with Perl to MySQL
and other database systems, there's Programming the Perl DBI (published in 2000 and still
very useful) by Alligator Descartes and Tim Bunce. To interface to MySQL with Java, you
can use the JDBC and JConnector drivers; George Reese's topic, Database Programming
with JDBC & Java (2000) is a useful resource on this topic.
In addition to published topics on MySQL, a few websites offer brief tutorials on using
MySQL. Incidentally, I've contributed a few articles to O'Reilly blogs and several other
publications on MySQL and related topics. MySQL's site also provides some in-depth art-
icles on MySQL . Many of these articles deal with new products and features, making them
ideal if you want to learn about using the latest releases available even while they're still in
the testing stages. All of these online publications are available for no cost, except the time
invested in reading them. If you are a MySQL support customer, though, you can get in-
formation about MySQL from their private Knowledge Base, of which I was the editor for
many years.
Once you've mastered the material in this topic, if you require more advanced training on
MySQL, MariaDB, or related topics, MariaDB Ab offers training courses. Some are for
one or two days, others are week-long courses offered in locations around the world. You