Rating: 
Summary: Easy and quick to understand; needs real examples
Review: It is very good at covering the "core" of MySQL and gives an introduction to relational databases in general (the relational model, SQL, normalization, etc.).My personal opinion is that Atkinson should have assumed the reader was already familiar with the relational model and spent more book space on MySQL. Atkinson's info on relational databases is decent but lacks depth and takes away space that could be used to give real examples of the uses of MySQL. I'm giving this book a five star because I feel the other reviewers were unfair.
Rating: 
Summary: Missing vital basic information
Review: The author seems to think that you'll always be connecting to MySQL from the same machine it is running on because he gives no clue how to connect from another machine. This is a question that comes up over and over again on the MySQL mailing list - without any answers. I hoped to find the answer in this book, but he didn't address the issue. The index also seems to only have the first couple of entries for the words indexed.
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