Rating: 

Mr. DuBois and O'Reilly publishing are clearly targeting a wide audience: the recipes range from frighteningly simple (e.g. 3.1, Specifying Which Columns to Select) to fairly sophisticated (e.g. 12.14, Performing a Join Between Tables in Different Databases). The recipes are typically clearly written, with ample supporting code examples and few typographical errors.

I must also note that Mr. DuBois nicely avoids a pitfall many authors (the competence of whom I have to question) in this genre encounter: failure to weave security considerations into the text. While other books often mention security as an afterthought, or worse include code examples featuring disasters like non-escaped strings (hello, SQL injection!), DuBois explicitly points out the need to sanitize input and writes code examples that demonstrate the use of prepared statements in best-practices.

Unfortunately, in other areas he is less thorough. For example, only passing mention is made of the (possible) dependence of FULLTEXT indexes on choice of storage engine. There is an entire chapter on handling duplicate rows, but the oft-needed (and non-obvious) process for removing pseudo-duplicate rows differing only by a primary key field is not directly addressed. Stored procedures, triggers, and other new additions to MySQL are among the least-well understood but most powerful features of the database engine, yet astonishingly little space is spent on them. (I could understand not discussing them in depth as there are other books available, but length did not seem to be a concern anywhere else in this book.)

In summary, the book is an excellent resource for novices and experts alike - but only as a starting point. To return to the cooking analogy, the book at times feels like it is loaded down with recipes on how to add sugar to flour, but omits recipes on how to ice the cake.