Bad Book Habits

I have a terrible addiction. I can never avoid a bookstore. Ever. It’s a money pit. I just go straight to the bookshelf and start grabbing books that I think would be beneficial. I’ll then zoom to the register, stop halfway and catch myself before I blow a bunch of money. When I was a Social Studies major, I ran straight to the History shelf. Now that I’m studying Information Science and Technology, I make a mad dash to the Computer bookshelf. I still knock people out of my way, knock over book cases, old ladies, small children, etc…

The bookstore staff just have to move the fortifications and checkpoints from the History section to the Computer Section. I’m sure they’re tickled pink about that.

A good example of this bad habit was today with my computer books. I have already one book that combines PHP and MySQL (Larry Ullman PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Websites from Visual Quickpro) and how to use both of these languages together. So, it’s a good book because it lays out both of the languages with a goal. A real application will be created by the end of the book.

Sadly, it glosses over quite a bit of PHP “for the sake of PHP” as well as MySQL “for the sake of MySQL” that you would find in the Osborne Complete Reference series. So, I wanted to grab a few books that would patch those holes. Originally I was going to grab the Complete SQL Reference off the shelf, as well as a Learning MySQL from O’Reilly. But I had to stop myself!

I already had PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Websites which laid out quite a bit of the Learning SQL material. I was basically buying the middle of PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Websites all over again! It’s good that I stopped myself. I already have the Complete SQL Reference at work that I borrow all the time, so I’d basically be buying the book all over again to satisfy the “IT’S MINE!” toddler urge.

So, I just settled on something a bit more exciting (You’re allowed to laugh, dear reader) and purchased the O’Reilly MySQL Cookbook. I think I made a very good choice because I have plenty of books that discuss the theory and application of SQL, but I think the Cookbook series goes into more nitty-gritty programming by presenting problems that you might encounter while developing and giving you a solution. Plus it includes PHP, Ruby, Python, and a host of other languages and how they interact with the SQL client APIs.

It takes all the fun out of having to write your own methods and code, tear your eyes out in frustration while you debug it, then finally get it right. Instead you just pop open the book and look for the problem that you’ve encountered, or just page through the book finding problems that you might encounter.

It’s funny though, because I still want the Complete SQL Reference so that I can dig even deeper into the methods that the SQL Cookbook calls, to get more information. The Complete SQL Reference is really overkill. It covers the DDL as well as the DML. It’s a huge book, you could really hurt someone with it if you started swinging it around.

It’s just ridiculous to buy the sucker when it’s given to me at work! Curse my workplace for giving me books!