Posted on 3 Comments

Fewer MySQL books coming out?

Just a subjective observation, been through a few bookstores this arvo (sorry, afternoon – Australian 😉 and I tend to do a quick check of the computer section to see what MySQL books are there.
It appears that over the last year or perhaps even longer, fewer new MySQL books have come out, and fewer MySQL books hang around on the shelves. Less interest, I don’t know.
O’Reilly’s annual report on the book market probably has some insight into this but it’s late in the evening here so I’m not going to delve into that right now.
Anyway, it’s quite possible that the market is fairly saturated, and there are some good books out there covering most features and uses. So all that remains is new functionality, and there hasn’t really been that much which warrants writing a completely new book about it. Stored procedures was probably the last such instance. Like, partitioning is interesting, but not for a full book. Falcon, diddums (at least at this stage – perhaps at some point an internals book on falcon would be interesting, but probably not commercially viable). Lacking is a book on InnoDB Internals?

Of course there’s the upcoming 2nd edition of High Performance MySQL, co-authored by Baron Schwartz, Peter Zaitsev, Vadim Tkachenko, and myself. But again that’s not a new book – strictly speaking, as it is pretty much redesigned/rewritten from scratch. It’s not new in the sense that I doubt it would have been commissioned, had there not already been a very popular 1st edition out there.

Anyway, thoughts/opinions welcome. Like I said, it was just a subjective observation; may be right, may be wrong!

Posted on 3 Comments

3 thoughts on “Fewer MySQL books coming out?

  1. Do you think it could be due to the release of 6.0 at the end of the calendar year. When 6.0 is GA (or about to be), you will see a flood of book.

  2. What makes you think 6.0 would be GA by the end of the year?
    And not that much is new in 6.0, just Falcon and online backup.
    See http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/6.0/en/mysql-nutshell.html
    In itself, again, not enough to warrant completely new books.

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