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MySQL: Building User Interfaces (Landmark)
by Matthew Stucky
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Sams (2001-07-11)
ISBN: 073571049X
EAN: 9780735710498
UPC: 752064710493
Dewy Decimal #: 005.7585
Paperback: 656 pages
SKU: 00-XCXB-0FG3
Condition: Good
Comments: Cover shows wear. Pages intact and unmarked.
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
MySQL: Designing User Interfaces starts by introducing the functionality of GTK+ and how to migrate from Microsoft's Visual Basic. It then introduces MySQL as a simple, fast, reliable database for corporate applications. The book then flows into the how-to of combining GTK+ and MySQL through the coverage of the C API for MySQL because it is the "backend" to a GTK+ application. It then expands its coverage and teaches about heterogeneous network and deployment issues, as well as migration from existing systems to MySQL.
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Customer Reviews
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Poor guide to database UI design
Rating  (2)
Date: 2002-08-12
2 out of 3 customers found this reveiw helpful
I'm not sure where all of these 5 and 4 stars are coming from. This book is absolutely horrible at addressing UI design. Half of the book is C code for GTK applications that could have been made available on a companion disk or on the website. And most of Stucky's explanation of things comes in the form of very brief comments embedded within the code. Lots of typos. Lots of butchered examples. No general GUI concepts covered. No coverage of multithreading issues. You're basically getting three non-real-world examples' code bound in a book and hardly any coverage of general user interface design concepts and ideologies. The title should have been "Beginner's Guide to Using GTK with MySQL and Glade".
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a book that delivers
Rating  (4)
Date: 2002-03-20
1 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
I've been working through this book for quite some time, and now that I've extracted all i can I have to declare myself delighted with it. The examples are good, deep enough to convey the lessons but shallow enough that not too much is irrelevant. I now have, as the author promised, several applications that will compile easily under both linux and win32. If i can fault the book at all , my only reservation is that is would have been nice to see all the necessary software included on the cd. Downloading all of the required applications and libraries (particularly for windows) led to a treasure hunt accross the web. That aside I would recommend this book to anyone who is not new to programming and databases, a little prior knowledge will be required as this is definately not a complete beginners book.
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Good book; Lousy database
Rating (4)
Date: 2001-12-27
4 out of 14 customers found this reveiw helpful
This book will guide you very well through learning the wrong database.Yes, I've read the book (long ago). It helped me to learn MySQL. It even made me an advocate of MySQL. But I didn't know the first thing about what makes a database work. I was following the masses of new web developers, ignorantly flocking to MySQL. If you need fantastic speed, rock-solid reliability and -- more importantly -- a true understanding of how real RDBMS systems work, learn and use PostreSQL. It runs circles around MySQL! (We use it to support web services in 20 countries). PostgreSQL will look far better on your resume than will MySQL. When I see PostgreSQL listed on a candidate's resume, I know (if the candidate is truly postgres-savvy) s/he can be counted on to work with virtually any database we support.
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Interesting Discussion
Rating  (3)
Date: 2001-11-21
3 out of 3 customers found this reveiw helpful
Mathew Stucky has written an interesting book on building Graphical User Interfaces that interface to the MySQL database. As such, it is a nice follow-on to MySQL by Paul Dubois. This book seems to be primarily aimed at VB developers (or similar GUI development frameworks) who wish to build GUI applications using MySQL as the backend. While MySQL runs on a wide range of different platforms, being an open-source product, it is extremely popular on Linux.The book tackles many different user interface projects in a consistent manner, starting with a problem definition, followed by designs of the UI and database, and concluding with an analysis of the application. The main complaint I had with the book is that it really discusses only one approach to building user interfaces to MySQL, completely ignoring the web interface, which could be built with PHP, JSPs, or even applets. Thus the title is somewhat misleading. Finally, the reader does need a fairly hefty background before starting this book.
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Great - but don't let the title fool you
Rating (4)
Date: 2001-11-16
10 out of 10 customers found this reveiw helpful
Let me say this right away: This is a good book. If you already know your way around MySQL and have at least a basic knowledge of C, you'll very quickly get up to speed in creating a MySQL GUI (GTK+) application for your co-workers or your client.
The introduction lays out some of the foundations, and the reader is warned that some skills are required before delving deeper into the book: Basic knowledge of C, SQL, Linux are all required to gain anything from this book. Some experience in VB, Delphi or other form-based IDEs will also give you a good start on the book.
The first section of the book gives a good run-down on MySQL, GTK+ and Glade. There are a few non-critical errors in the text (stating that a MySQL table is limited to 50 mio. records; claiming that Qt is not free, although the Qt/X11 is released under the GPL). The chapters on GTK+ also give the reader the first taste of the author's preference on using page upon page of commented source, rather than explanatory body text.
The second section is a walk-through of three Real-world implementations. The first is a relatively simple order entry application; the second a commissions calculation application and the third a fairly complex report generator. In all three examples, the focus is primarily on Glade and GTK+, and very little mention is made of MySQL.
The third section is a short discussion on using the XML files generated by Glade, which may -- in some very specific cases - allow the programmer to make changes to an application without recompiling a project. This discussion really is too short, and I wonder whether the reader might be confused more than helped by this chapter. These pages could have been of much better use if the author had spent some more time discussing security issues in MySQL and applications, something which this books sorely lacks. There is some discussion on the subject, but it's much too short and general.
One thing I really like about the examples is the "running commentary" on how to distribute programs, moving from a simple "copy the executable" over "make install" and ending up at "building an RPM".
I like examples, and a good tutorial should contain a lot of them. Some of the code examples in the book are very good -- those where a small section of a program is shown, and each important line of code is emphasized and explained. In this book, the author has chosen to give us page up and page down of program listings, which, although well commented in-line, make for extreme terse reading. More than half the book is comprised of program listings, and that's not counting the last 150+ pages making up the appendix, consisting solely of program listings. I have serious doubts that anyone will ever be reading these.
The title of the book is, unfortunately, very badly chosen. "MySQL" suggests that you can only use this book with the MySQL DBMS, even though many of the SQL examples are really quite general in scope; "Building User Interfaces" suggests that this book contains a general discussion on UI, while it is in fact very heavily centered on GTK+. The layout of the front page also suggests that the main focus on the book is MySQL, which is not true -- only about 25% of the contents are set off for discussing MySQL, the rest of the book is about Glade and GTK.
If you're coming from a Windows/MS-Access background and wish to know more about writing GUI applications for MySQL, program deployment, this book is definitely for you. If you've never worked with MySQL (or any other SQL database), you should get some more experience before getting this book.
I'm giving five stars for the contents minus one for a misleading title page.
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