From Wsms

MySQL Tutorial
A concise introduction to the fundamentals of working with MySQL
Luke Welling and Laura Thomson
ISBN 0672-32584-5
http://www.amazon.com/MySQL-Tutorial-Luke-Welling/dp/0672325845
http://lukelaura.com

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 penguins

Review

This is a good book.

It provides interesting historical perspectives in a couple of places.FIXME

Joins are discussed starting on page 100; subqueries are discussed on page 101.

Perhaps the biggest problem is that there is no sample databases available in computer readable form. Maybe there used to be when lukelaura.com was maintained.

Cons

MySQL 5 has been out for a while, but this book only addresses up to version 4.1. For that, you probably need the 2nd edition: http://www.amazon.com/MySQL-Tutorial-2nd-Luke-Welling/dp/0672328720. If you are a serious student, you will need more than this book has. For example, it doesn't discuss DELETE CASCADE or referential integrity. It doesn't cover user-defined variables like:

mysql> select @birth := birth from president where last_name = 'Jackson';

It doesn't cover views.

The book's supposed website, http://www.lukelaura.com, is not active.

Pros

This book is concise and readable. It covers everything you need to get going. I found zero errors!

It has reasonable coverage of security. For example, immediatly after covering MySQL installation, it shows how to set passwords for the root accounts and remove the anonymous account.