MySQL Cookbook

MySQL APIs Used in This Book

MySQL programming interfaces exist for many languages, including (in alphabetical order) C, C++, Eiffel, Java, Pascal, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Smalltalk, and Tcl.^[] Given this fact, writing a MySQL cookbook presents an author with something of a challenge. Clearly the book should provide recipes for doing many interesting and useful things with MySQL, but which API or APIs should the book use? Showing an implementation of every recipe in every language would result either in covering very few recipes or in a very, very large book! It would also result in a lot of redundancy when implementations in different languages bear a strong resemblance to each other. On the other hand, it's worthwhile taking advantage of multiple languages, because one language often will be more suitable than another for solving a particular type of problem.

^[] To see what APIs are currently available, visit the development portal at the MySQL web site, located at http://www.mysql.com/portal/development/html/.

To resolve this dilemma, I've picked a small number of APIs from among those that are available and used them to write the recipes in this book. This limits its scope to a manageable number of APIs while allowing some latitude to choose from among them. The primary APIs covered here are:

Perl

Using the DBI module and its MySQL-specific driver

PHP

Using its set of built-in MySQL support functions

Python

Using the DB-API module and its MySQL-specific driver

Java

Using a MySQL-specific driver for the Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) interface

Why these languages? Perl and PHP were easy to pick. Perl is arguably the most widely used language on the Web, and it became so based on certain strengths such as its text-processing capabilities. In particular, it's very popular for writing MySQL programs. PHP also is widely deployed, and its use is increasing steadily. One of PHP's strengths is the ease with which you can use it to access databases, making it a natural choice for MySQL scripting. Python and Java are not as popular as Perl or PHP for MySQL programming, but each has significant numbers of followers. In the Java community in particular, MySQL seems to be making strong inroads among developers who use JavaServer Pages (JSP) technology to build database-backed web applications. (An anecdotal observation: After I wrote MySQL (New Riders), Python and Java were the two languages not covered in that book that readers most often said they would have liked to have seen addressed. So here they are!)

I believe these languages taken together reflect pretty well the majority of the existing user base of MySQL programmers. If you prefer some language not shown here, you can still use this book, but be sure to pay careful attention to Chapter 2, to familiarize yourself with the book's primary API languages. Knowing how database operations are performed with the APIs used here will help you understand the recipes in later chapters so that you can translate them into languages not discussed.