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6 useful books on MySQL for starting and developing skills

Collected books on working with MySQL - the most popular relational DBMS for any application. Save the text for your bookmarks: it will come in handy for beginners and advanced professionals alike.

"PHP and MySQL. 25 Lessons for Beginners. Author: Vladimir Dronov

Level → For Beginners

This book is a clear and step-by-step guide: it contains 25 illustrated lessons and 30+ practical exercises. After studying it, you will be able to create a website with a database linked to it.

Here are some examples of the topics covered in the book:
  • Software generation of web pages;
  • Checking the correctness of the data sent by the visitor;
  • Creating MySQL and MariaDB databases in the program phpMyAdmin;
  • Sending email;
  • Protection of sites from unauthorized intrusion and counteraction to network attacks;
  • Encryption of sensitive data;
  • Moving the site to a secure protocol HTTPS;
  • Writing REST Web Service;
  • Dividing code into models, templates and controllers;
  • Creating a PHP framework.

The author is a professional programmer, writer and journalist, working in the IT field since 1987. He has written more than 30 books about programming.


"MySQL. A collection of recipes". Author: Paul Dubois

Level → Mixed: suitable not only for beginners

This book contains everyday tasks for programmers with detailed descriptions of solutions and code snippets. This level of detail allows you to understand how MySQL works together with Perl, PHP, Python and Java, and to apply ready-made "recipes" to your tasks.

Here are some examples of the topics covered in the book:
  • Interaction with the server;
  • Changing the structure of tables;
  • Data import and export;
  • Using scripting in conjunction with MySQL to read queries from a file;
  • Generating queries for popular tasks;
  • Creating MySQL scripts for the Web;
  • Detecting, counting, removing and preventing duplicates;
  • Calculating statistical characteristics, density distributions, regressions and correlations.

The book has several editions: the first and the second are more suitable for novice developers. They are written for the old version 4.0. For programmers with good English we recommend the third edition of the book - it deals with MySQL 5.6.


"MySQL 8 for Big Data." Authors: S. Challawala, D. Lakhataria, C. Mehta, and K. Patel

Level → for continuing users

This book will be useful to MySQL database administrators and Big Data specialists working with MySQL and Hadoop. It explains how to use this DBMS to process records and retrieve data with high performance.

Here are a few of the tools and topics the guide talks about:
  • Apache Hadoop, MapReduce, and MySQL Applier tools;
  • MySQL integration with the NoSQL API;
  • use of Apache Sqoop for real-time event processing;
  • MySQL integration with Big Data computation tools.

Before reading this, we recommend that you get at least a little experience with this DBMS. This will help you to better understand how to use MySQL 8 to manage Big Data.
By the way, on the site of the publishing house, an archive with the code is available for download. It will come in handy for practical tasks.


"MySQL to the max". Authors: Baron Schwartz, Vadim Tkachenko, and Pyotr Zaitsev

Level → Mixed: suitable not only for beginners

This book is about how to build a fast and reliable system based on MySQL. How to design schemas, indexes and queries to configure the server, hardware and operating system.
Due to the detailed analysis of cases and ways to optimize SQL-queries the manual will be suitable for developers with different levels of knowledge.

Here are some examples of the topics covered in the book:
  • The history and architecture of MySQL;
  • Benchmarking;
  • Server performance profiling;
  • Schema and data type optimization;
  • Performance enhancement with indexing;
  • Query performance optimization;
  • MySQL scaling;
  • Database replication;
  • Load balancing.

Implement your MySQL knowledge in ready-to-use Selectel databases. Create a cluster, and we'll take care of reliability, backup and infrastructure support.


Murach's MySQL 3rd Edition. Author: Joel Murach

Level → for beginners.

The third version of the book was published in 2019. It does not require advanced knowledge in programming, but development experience and fluent English will definitely come in handy - the book has not yet been translated into Russian.
The guide introduces you to the concepts and terms relevant to any database. You will also learn how to use the MySQL Workbench to work with the database and execute SQL queries.

Here are a few sections to work with after the introductory part:
  • Advanced data extraction skills: summary queries, subqueries, data types and functions, window functions and CTE;
  • Database design and implementation: working with EER (enhanced entity-relationship) model, database design using DDL (Data Definition Language) operators;
  • Initial set of skills for working as a database administrator: protection, backup and recovery;
  • MySQL for creating stored procedures, functions, triggers and events, transaction and lock management.

Murach's PHP and MySQL 4th Edition. By Joel Murach and Ray Harris

Level → Mixed: suitable not only for beginners

This book was published in 2021 and has not been translated into Russian yet. It begins with the basics of developing and maintaining sites in PHP and MySQL. The only prerequisite for its study is the presence of skills in HTML and CSS.

From the first part of the book you will learn:
  • How to use the MySQL database;
  • How to develop database applications with PHP;
  • How to structure code in applications using the MVC pattern;
  • How to organize and test web applications.

After that, the authors move on to more complex topics about building dynamic sites. For example:
  • Development of applications using arrays, functions, regular expressions, exception handling, libraries, and custom objects;
  • Object-oriented approach to data validation;
  • Database design;
  • Using SQL DDL statements to create a database, retrieve and update data;
  • Creating secure connections and password hashing;
  • User authentication;
  • Advanced methods of working with uploads, files and images.