Review: Mastering phpMyAdmin 2.11 for Effective MySQL Management

Posted January 21st, 2009 in MySql and PHP

The post has a look at the book "Mastering phpMyAdmin 2.11 for Effective MySQL Management" by Marc Delisle (who is one of the phpMyAdmin developers) and available to buy from the Packt Publishing website, where you can buy it as a hard copy book or an eBook. I am not affiliated with Marc Delisle or Packt Publishing in any way, but was supplied a free copy of the eBook to review.

phpMyAdmin

phpMyAdmin in a web browser based system for managing MySQL and running queries etc. It has been under constant development since 1998; the current version at the time of this post is phpMyAdmin 3.1.2 which only works on PHP 5.2 or greater. The book reviewed in this post covers phpMyAdmin 2.11 which works on older versions of PHP as well.

You can download phpMyAdmin from the phpMyAdmin Sourceforge Project pages.

The Book

The book covers every possible thing you can do with phpMyAdmin over 20 chapters and 300+ pages, from installing and basic use to defining relationships between tables with the special pmadb database.

If you are new to phpMyAdmin then this book is an excellent resource. phpMyAdmin is already an intuitive tool to use, but if there's anything you're unclear about then it's covered in this book. It also includes a comprehensive troubleshooting section at the end which covers issues with getting phpMyAdmin up and running and other issues. Having a good read through this book will familiarise yourself with all the functions available in phpMyAdmin.

I've been using phpMyAdmin for about 8 or 9 years and thought I knew pretty much all there was to know about it. While I found most of the chapters covered fairly basic stuff I still learnt that you can create bookmarks for select statements and easily resuse them, something I wasn't aware of until reading this book. So even if you're an advanced user there's bound to be something in it for you.