I really enjoy O'Reilly books, but this one was a bit lacking. My biggest problem was that it should have really spent a lot more time dealing with SQL statements. How to put information into a relation database and do queries on multiple tables. I ended getting most of the information that I needed from the MySQL mailing list. The book helped me to understand the concept of a relational database, but I had to figure out for myself how to actually implement it and make a useful program with it. I would have rather they didn't spend as much time on the individual programming languages and spent more time on MySQL and msql. PHP, Java, and all the other languages can fill their own books or volumes quite easily. There should have been more real world examples of different database structures and implementations.

Maybe next time.