Giving thanks to MySQL authors challenge

Next week the US celebrates Thanksgiving Day. For those that are American or live here, this is a significant event. Three different experiences recently have lead me to write this request for ALL MySQL community members to give thanks to those that have contributed to the MySQL ecosystem. I have made a commitment to myself, and I would like to challenge others to write one book review per week in December, that’s 4 book reviews to the MySQL books that I have on my bookshelf that have made an impact in some way. I ask others to give it a go too.

It only takes a few minutes to pen a comment on Amazon, or a publishers site, but to authors it means so much more. I can only speak for myself, but any comment; good, bad or ugly; helps to know you are out there and you took the time to acknowledge somebody’s work of art (in this case a publication).

I only have to look at my bookshelf and I find the following MySQL books (in order they currently are placed which is no specific order), MySQL Crash Course by Ben Forta, MySQL Clustering by Alex Davies and Harrison Fisk, MySQL Cookbook by Paul DuBois, MySQL Stored Procedure Programming by Guy Harrison, Developing Web Applications with Apache, MySQL, memcached, and Perl by Patrick Galbraith, Pro MySQL (The Expert’s Voice in Open Source) by Mike Kruckenberg and Jay Pipes, MySQL Administrator’s Bible by Sheeri Cabral, MySQL (Third Edition) by Paul DuBois, High Performance MySQL: Optimization, Backups, Replication, and More (Second Edition) by Baron Schwartz, Peter Zaitsev, Vadim Tkachenko, Jeremy Zawodny, Arjen Lentz and Derek Balling, High Performance MySQL: Optimization, Backups, and Replication (Third Edition) by Baron Schwartz, Peter Zaitsev, Vadim Tkachenkoo, MySQL High Availability: Tools for Building Robust Data Centers by Charles Bell, Mats Kindal and Lars Thalman, Expert PHP and MySQLby Andrew Curiso, Ronald Bradford and Patrick Galbraith, Effective MySQL Backup and Recovery (Oracle Press) by Ronald Bradford, Effective MySQL Replication Techniques in Depth by Ronald Bradford and Chris Schneider, Effective MySQL Optimizing SQL Statements (Oracle Press) by Ronald Bradford, Database in Depth: Relational Theory for Practitioners by Chris Date, Pentaho Solutions: Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing with Pentaho and MySQL by Roland Bouman and Josh an Dongen, MySQL Administrator’s Guide and Language Reference (2nd Edition) and MySQL 5.0 Certification Study Guide by Paul Dubois, Stefan Hinz and Cartsten Pedersen.

And they are just the physical books, I have several PDF and Kindle only versions, and other MySQL Books I know about and have not purchased.

I would also like to give a special shout out to Sheeri Cabral and MySQL Marinate. A program using the O’Reilly Learning MySQL book to help anybody that wants to learn. At my most recent Effective MySQL Meetup a beginner question was asked by an audience member, and it was another audience member (not even myself) that piped up and recommended MySQL Marinate.

Finally, I learned MySQL by reading the online reference manual from cover to cover, and I did it again several years later, and probably should do it again some day. I am unable to find the names of the authors present or past, nor the right place you could leave a comment, but thanks to those I do know about, Jon Stephens, Mike Hillyer, Stefan Hinz, MC Brown and Paul DuBois.

Comments

  1. John Russell says

    The current authors of the MySQL Ref Man are listed here: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/manual-info.html

    I don’t know of a comprehensive listing for all time. You can see names of some past authors in the commit archives, e.g. Tony Bedford and me: http://www.google.com/cse?cx=002565457062924244260%3A9wcvqqvsdma&q=refman-5.5&sa=Search&siteurl=lists.mysql.com%2Fcommits&ref=lists.mysql.com%2Fcommits%2F114969&ss=4861j1754923j23#gsc.tab=0&gsc.q=trunk%2Frefman-5.5

    or where people have cached a copy at some point in time: http://doc.docs.sk/mysql-refman-5.5/manual-info.html