Howdy monks! long time fan of you guys here!

Well I hope you don't mind me asking this non-programming question here, so here it goes.

I really want to start picking up MySQL. I was wondering if you could recommend a book that gets you up to speed on it and provides a good rounded education on the topic.

For a job I recently got I had to relatively quickly learn PHP. That actually seems to be going pretty well. My background in Perl is allowing me to pick it up rather quickly. I will be using PHP just sort of as a handy interface to MySQL.

But I do have a book on Programming the Perl DBI from O'Reilly. Once I get my MySQL chops up to par I want to start using Perl for accessing the DB because I a) know it much better than PHP and b) think that Perl is way more powerful than PHP.

To summarize:

What book is best to get a good rounded knowledge of MySQL? What book is best to get me up to speed in reasonably short time in PHP so that I can access MySQL with it?

And if you would like to weigh in on why PHP may be good for some cases and Perl for others, I'm all ears.

Thoughts? Thanks Monks!!!

In reply to MySQL Book and PHP vs Perl by bluethundr

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