Over the Christmas break I had the opportunity to read a couple of MariaDB books.
The first was Building a Web Application with PHP and MariaDB by Sai Srinivas Sriparasa. It’s been a long time since I’ve been involved in web app development in general or PHP in particular. The MariaDB parts were nice and solid, letting you know what you needed, when you needed it. Chapter 2 especially had some good overviews of various topics; stored procedures, routines, and triggers; that I never got a chance to cover in either of my books. The PHP parts of the book were a fun trip down memory lane for me. I don’t know if I’ll be using what I learned about REST APIs, MVC, and other topics, but I enjoyed learning about all of it.
The second was Mastering MariaDB by Federico Razzoli. I’ve known Federico for a few years now. We’ve never actually met, but he’s one of the most active community editors and translators over at the MariaDB Knowledge Base, the home of MariaDB’s official documentation. This book is an excellent follow-up to my Getting Started with MariaDB book. It assumes a knowledge of MariaDB fundamentals and builds on those to do what the title says, help you master MariaDB.
I consider myself a fairly advanced MariaDB user, but both books were able to teach me many things. I don’t have much experience with sharding and replication, I mean, I’ve tested and played around with them, but I’ve never used them in large production environments. So, reading the chapters on those in Mastering MariaDB was good and I can honestly say I learned a few things.
It was a great way to pass a few hours during the Christmas break.