I was recently asked by Packt Publishing to review a copy of their latest book, Mastering phpMyAdmin 3.1 which promises to "increase your MySQL productivity and control by discovering the real power of phpMyAdmin 3.1". I was a little skeptical at first of a book on phpMyAdmin, the most widely used MySQL admin tool, especially when it arrived at 325 pages! However, there is a huge amount of information that really is very useful to every PHP developer out there whether you are a beginner or an advanced user.

Now, most people I've mentioned the book to have scoffed and said something along the lines of "I already know how to use phpMyAdmin". Like them, I thought I knew what phpMyAdmin was and what it could do but it turns out there are huge amounts of functionality I never knew existed in MySQL let alone in phpMyAdmin!

For the Beginner

The book starts off with a very gradual introduction to phpMyAdmin covering everything from basic installation and setup to a detailed explanation of the overall interface. I was particularly pleased to see an in-depth chapter on security configuration at the beginning of the book which would help any newcomer make sure that their setup is completely secure - usually such chapters are found at the back in the appendices! The first six chapters follow in a similar vein with very basic information about how to run SQL queries, edit data, change structures, and so on but chapters seven and eight deal with exporting and importing data which is one of the many areas that I have seen developers struggle with in the past. There is a good explanation of the different methods for importing / exporting including the benefits of certain types over others. Crucially, there is a section on CSV using LOAD DATA which is something that has always seemed to lack proper explanation to me in the past.

There then follows a few more chapters which more advanced users can probably skip such as searching, an overview of relational databases, and table / database operations.

Advanced Topics

I would say that the real meat of the book for experienced PHP developers begins at chapter thirteen with each further chapter adding useful knowledge. I've listed the key highlights of these chapters below:

• The Multi-Table Query Generator - A powerful tool which enables you to fine tune complex queries via a series of forms thus allowing you to specify multiple criteria. It contains features such as automatic joins which allow you to very easily build up complex queries.
• Bookmarks - A feature I was completely unaware of that allows you to save queries for future use. This is particularly useful if you happen to be a database administrator that administers purely on a table by table basis within phpMyAdmin and has a number of queries to run. I always used to have popular queries I'd use stored in a notepad on my OS X Dashboard but no need anymore!
• System Documentation - I recently had a need to produce some MySQL documentation so was very happy to read this chapter and find out about the excellent documentation tools available within phpMyAdmin. This includes not only a basic print view, but also a data dictionary and a relational schema which are all exported as PDFs.
• MIME-Based Transformations - If you're the kind of developer that likes to store images, etc, as BLOB fields. With transformations, you can make images appear as images within the phpMyAdmin results rather than as indecipherable encoded text. Very useful!
• MySQL 5.0 and 5.1 - a quick look at the enhancements that MySQL 5 added with things such as views, routines, stored procedures, and very interestingly, triggers (a way to run other MySQL commands when a certain thing happens - e.g. when a table gets updated). You'd probably want a separate book to cover MySQL 5 if you were planning on doing any development with it, but this chapter gives you a good overview of some of the things you can expect.
• MySQL Server Administration - The final chapter deals with some of the more fundamental maintenance tasks related to the actual server and improvements that can be made with caching etc as well as a good comparison of the different types of storage engine you can choose.

Summary

All in all, I would highly recommend this book to any PHP developer or anybody that is using phpMyAdmin on a regular basis. It could really have been broken into two books - a beginners and an advanced - but it works well by acting as a reference for those developers that have grown up using phpMyAdmin. The main thing though is that it taught me a great deal about phpMyAdmin that I didn't realise was even there - just goes to show that even a basic sounding book can have a great deal to offer.

Mastering phpMyAdmin 3.1 is available online from Packt Publishing