Introduction - Learning MySQL - page 6

To follow the content in this topic, you will need some software; fortunately, all the
software we use is open source, free for noncommercial use, and easily downloaded
from the Internet. To cover all parts of this topic, you need a MySQL database server,
Perl, and a web server that can talk to MySQL using the PHP and Perl programming
languages. We'll explore four aspects of using MySQL:
MySQL server
We explain how to create your own MySQL installation, and how to configure and
administer it.
SQL
This is the core of MySQL use, and the major topic in this topic. It's introduced in
“Structured Query Language.”
Programming languages
SQL is not a simple or intuitive language, and it can be tedious to repeatedly per-
form complex operations. You can instead use a general-purpose programming
language such as PHP or Perl to automatically create and execute SQL queries on
the MySQL server. You can also hide the details of the interaction with the database
behind a user-friendly interface. We'll show you how to do this.
Web database applications
We explain how you can use PHP or Perl to create dynamic, database-driven web
applications that can publish information from the database to the Web, and cap-
ture information provided by users.
HTML is the lingua franca of the Web. Although learning HTML is not within the
scope of this topic, there are many great HTML guides available, including HTML and
XHTML: The Definitive Guide by Chuck Musciano (O'Reilly). We recommend that
you pick up the basics of HTML before reading Chapters 13, 14, 15, or 18.
The LAMP Platform
It's very common to find web database applications developed using the Linux oper-
ating system, the Apache web server, the MySQL database management system, and
the Perl or PHP scripting language. This combination is often referred to by the acronym
LAMP, a term invented at O'Reilly Media.
Linux is the most common development and deployment platform, but as we'll show
in this topic, you can run all the tools on other operating systems. In fact, we'll give
directions for getting started on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. Most of the content
in this topic can be used for other operating systems with little modification.
The P in LAMP originally stood for Perl, but over the past decade, users have increas-
ingly turned to PHP for developing dynamic web pages. PHP is very clean and efficient
for retrieving data and displaying it with minimal processing. If you have to do heavy
data crunching after the data is returned from MySQL, Perl may still be a better choice.
We discuss PHP and Perl largely independently; you can pick up one without needing