While Core PHP was my first book and the one that most people know, I also wrote a book in 2001 on MySQL called Core MySQL. It didn’t sell very well, probably because Paul Dubois already had a good book on the market about MySQL. Core PHP owed a good portion of its success to being first (well, Egon Schmidt’s book in German came out a couple weeks before mine, but the English-reading market is a lot bigger.)
Still, I am proud of Core MySQL because I had a better handle on the principles of organizing a book after doing two editions of Core PHP by that time. And I had to think through more things for that book because MySQL is more than just the SQL language. I liked learning relational database theory deeper than I did when I was in college and then figuring out how to explain it.
My contracts with Prentice Hall include a clause that returns the rights to the text to me if they cease publishing them. It’s taken a year for them to work through the process. Recently I got a letter confirmed that the rights are now returned to me. That will allow me to release the text under some sort of open license. Hopefully my spin on thing will help someone learn MySQL and relational databases.
Stay tuned for details and send me suggestions for licenses. I haven’t researched the options yet.
