We wrote this book to serve the needs of not just the MySQL application developer
but also the MySQL database administrator. We assume that you are already relatively
experienced with MySQL. We also assume some experience with general system administration,
networking, and Unix-like operating systems.
The second edition of this book presented a lot of information to readers, but no book
can provide complete coverage of a topic. Between the second and third editions, we
took notes on literally thousands of interesting problems we’d solved or seen others
solve. When we started to outline the third edition, it became clear that not only would
full coverage of these topics require three to five thousand pages, but the book still
wouldn’t be complete. After reflecting on this problem, we realized that the second
edition’s emphasis on deep coverage was actually self-limiting, in the sense that it often
didn’t teach readers how to think about MySQL.
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