[COLUG] Best PHP/Apache/MySQL/Linux book?

[Tom Hanlon]

Hey Peter,

I also recommend the MySQL 5.0 Certification study guide.

Paul Dubois' books are all pretty good. They all seem to have Meso- 
American Pre columbian pyramids on them. (mayan and Aztec temples)  
MySQL has hired him so you will begin to see more and more of his  
well written text in the Docs moving forward.

Jay Pipes "Pro MySQL" is pretty good. MySQL hired him also.  Moral to  
the story .. write a book get hired by MySQL.

The following Books from MySQL press that are worthwhile.

If you are interested in Cluster, and you probably are NOT going to  
begin by using cluster. But Harrison Fisk's book is good.

"MySQL Database Design and Tuning" is also good.

Other books that are good.

For an overview of load balancing using Replication and mostly MyISAM  
tables check out "High Performance MySQL" by Jeremy Zawodny.  This  
book is beginning to be a little old but it is pretty good in terms  
of running the MySQL backend to yahoo Finance.  Or any similar  
application.

If you want to look into the Source code, Jay Pipes book goes there a  
little bit, but Chuck Bell's "Expert MySQL" provides a more in depth  
tour of the code base. MySQL hired Chuck Bell also (see previous moral).


In addition the online reference manual, Online is best because the  
user submitted comments are sometimes extremely helpful, I recommend  
a tour of http://dev.mysql.com

In particular the "whitepapers" and "articles.  Here are some links.
http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/
http://www.mysql.com/why-mysql/white-papers/

A nice site that is growing and contains helpful little code snippets  
is.
http://forge.mysql.com/

There are some good bloggers on MySQL but without a doubt the best is  
Peter Zaitsev's mysqlperformance blog.
Here are all the blogs that we are aware of..
http://www.planetmysql.org/
Peter worked for MySQL for a bit and his expertise is unquestioned.  
In general he favors Innodb over MyISAM, check out his blog and see  
why. Get to know Innodb and more from his Blog. http:// 
www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/

The PHP online docs are good.

As for compiling PHP Apache and MySQL from source. Best done by  
installing Apache and MySQL before PHP. You will need to have  
libmysqlclient.so in your library path so make sure that the "binary  
tarball" you grab from MySQL has it. The rpm for client libraries has  
it but the complete source did NOT have it for a series of releases.  
I believe it has it now.  Run ldconf with the /usr/local/mysql/lib  
directory in the ld.conf file.

If you want advanced MySQL stuff then the demon you start is mysqld- 
max. This is NOT maxdb, maxdb is a SAP compliant version. MySQLD-max  
will have the funky storage engines like federated, black hole and  
CSV. Note that mysqld-max was missing from the source tarball for a  
while also. Third party builds of MySQL are available from  
DorsalSource, look them up I forget the URL.

For a quick test environment I really like XAMPP. It installs Apache  
mySQL and PHP in windows and or linux very easily. Saves you all the  
hassle but probably gives you more up to date parts than yum install  
mySQL or Apt-get mysql will get you.

I can NOT vouch for the security of Xampp. It throws a bit of  
phpmyadmin and the like into the mix. It may be a good way for you to  
get a know working example to explore configuration options and the  
like. Come to think of it .. I can not vouch for the security of  
anything ever ! So it may be just fine.

As for managing mysql php and apache. You will find that most of  
these tools work extremely well with few surprises or headaches. the  
most solid of course is apache. PHP and MySQL are moving too fast to  
be as stable as good ole apache.

Regards,
Tom