Does anyone have a nice introduction to MySQL?
I am working on a project, and have decided to move up from flat file databases to the real deal, only now I’m a bit stuck. It could be partly because it’s 11:30 at night, but I really don’t know anything about MySQL, so I need to teach myself a little.
Anyone with a good tutorial would be appreciated.
This might be to basic for your but I found it very helpful for what little SQL work I needed. I just did a google search for SQL Tutorial and found this.
I assume that you want a tutorial with MySQL and PHP, so here you go:
Greg,
If I had to recommend some books, there are two I’ve learned a great deal from. I prefer them over free tutorials, because often times, I’ve found that I need a large number of websites to become even moderately comfortable with broad topics, but a couple of handy books seem to provide everything in one place and even tell me things I didn’t know I needed to know (If that makes any sense?) These two titles are around $13 and $22 respectively…
Beginning PHP4 - Despite the title, this book is actually half PHP and half SQL. It definitely gives a good start of the fundamentals, from creating databases, variable types, organizing data, optimizing queries. I have a half dozen tabs indexing what I use most often and it provides a good transition between PHP and MySQL. The examples are pretty practical.
MySQL Cookbook - Once you get things going, this book answers a lot of common, “How do I…?” questions with full examples. If you’re doing things quick and dirty and need snippets, this is a great title. I found it to be very useful.
Good luck!
Matt
I had an great general database book for one of my courses. The course itself was aimed at MySQL, but also applied to .asp, etc, etc, etc.
Database Management, Databases and Organizations, by Richard T. Watson. I got mine on half.com for a few bucks.
Good Luck
I pretty much learned PHP / MySQL from this one tutorial, follow it through (even if your purpose isn’t to make a membership system), and it should be real easy to pick up the basics and run with it.
http://www.phpfreaks.com/tutorials/40/0.php
PS: Check out the rest of the site too, they have a lot of other good stuff.
Wow, thanks for the deluge of responses!
I was at Battlecry all day today, but I’ll sort through this all tomorrow.
Thanks!
No problem, feel free to IM me if you need any help.
My starting place, and the one I recommend to anyone that asks, would have to be http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/tutorial.html There are very few questions that can’t be answered in the mySQL docs, and that tutorial is a great starting point. That’s pretty much the only site I read when learning mySQL… I didn’t spend any money on books. If you do want a book, O’Reilly (as someone mentioned) has some great books out.
That’s true, but the documentation is written horribly, its obviously done by people who totally understand it, but I find myself looking up something. Then having to look up multiple other things just to understand what its saying about the original thing I looked up! Bad documentation IMO. 
I use flat files instead anyway. 
About 6 hours of coding later, it is born!
I’d prefer if you guys didn’t add yourselves to see how it works, I’d like to keep it going for real with kids in my school. You can however look around and check out my super-special admin page (which doesn’t let you break or delete anything, don’t worry). The pieces together all ought to give you an idea how it works. It’s nothing fancy, but it’s a nice little (useful) project to teach myself PHP/MySQL
Actually, it can be really cool if you get a lot of people to input, like the one a friend and i made 
Ya coulda just asked for a copy of the code
Well I just launched it at 11pm last night, so having 31 people already is pretty good. Your code looks like it does a lot more stuff than mine, and I might borrow some ideas from you, but if you gave me the source then I wouldn’t have learned anything! 
Great job. A nice feature could be to display what lunch people have if your school has more than one lunch period. I’m invious of your user base, i spent a few months on a coding project and don’t have nearly as big of a user base.
P.S. I love your 404 page!
We don’t know our lunches yet, but that’s not a bad idea. I probably rushed this a little - I don’t have any semester support for half year classes.
Thanks about the 404 page. I wrote it on an airplane flying through like seven time zones, so I was a bit tired.