Just thought I’d update you. We got quite a few good errata from readers, and I took a couple weekends and went through the book with a fine-toothed comb, catching typos and subtle errors that crept in at some point (TPC benchmarks were labeled as TCP benchmarks — did you catch that one?). I marked up my book and mailed it to O’Reilly, who went well above and beyond what they normally do for errata. Normally, once a book is in print they will fix only serious technical errors. They fixed everything, even going as far as rearranging page breaks and moving figures to improve readability.

The second printing is on Monday August 4th. Already! I think the book has been selling a lot better than anticipated. I know I am psyched to see it remain in the top couple thousand on Amazon. And they thought it was a big deal when it broke five thousand!

In other news, it’s going to be translated into Spanish, Polish, and Portuguese. So now …

I have been getting a lot of comments and errata from people who seem to be mistakenly buying the first edition and believing it’s the second edition. A lot of the blame for this probably rests with Amazon, who did not distinguish between the two editions at all until the editor and I (among others) leaned on them persistently for about 6 weeks. I think some people are buying the second edition and getting the first edition.

I’ve even spoken to people in person who said “yeah, I’ve been reading it” and I give them a copy of the second edition to hold in their hands, and they go “whoa, that is like twice the size. I don’t have this edition at all.”

If you have any question at all, just look at the front cover. If you have the second edition, you will see it clearly in the upper right-hand corner of the cover, as shown in this picture:

I feel like a Microsoft Anti-Piracy Minion “educating” you about how to …

Apparently High Performance MySQL, 2nd Edition is selling quite well — I’m not sure exactly how well — because we’re preparing for a second printing. This makes me very happy. I don’t think they anticipated going back to the press for quite some time.

The book fluctuates between sales rank 1000 and 2000 on Amazon during the day, and has reached as high as 600 or so. This is just phenomenal. The O’Reilly team was psyched when it broke 5000, and so was I — but now we’ve stayed under 2000 for a long time (except when Amazon sold out of it). Frankly I’d have thought that for a niche-market book like this, we’d have been in the 10,000 range or something like that.

Clearly we (the authors, editors, publisher, etc) have done something right! This is a great feeling.

Thanks for sending errata, by the way. I have just completed proofreading the whole …

The Sphinx project just released version 0.9.8, with many enhancements since the previous release. There’s never been a better time to try it out. It’s really cool technology.

What is Sphinx? Glad you asked. It’s fast, efficient, scalable, relevant full-text searching and a heck of a lot more. In fact, Sphinx complements MySQL for a lot of non-search queries that MySQL frankly isn’t very good at, including WHERE clauses on low-selectivity columns, ORDER BY with a LIMIT and OFFSET, and GROUP BY. A lot of you are probably running fairly simple queries with these constructs and getting really bad performance in MySQL. I see it a lot when I’m working with clients, and there’s often not much room for optimization. Sphinx can execute a subset of such queries very efficiently, due to its smart I/O algorithms and the way it uses memory. By “subset” I mean you don’t get the …

The book is done now, right? What’s next?

Don’t tell my wife this, but a book is never done.

Right now I’m proofreading the printed copy. I proofread PDF after PDF during production, but some problems will always slip through and make it to paper. I’m finding quite a few little mistakes. For example, at one point we refer to TPC as TCP three times in a row. Oops.

These problems will be corrected in the next printing. Please notify me if you find any errors yourself, and I’ll add them to the list of things to fix! Also let me know if you find things that should just be “fixed” in general. For example, the layout and page-breaking on pages 364 and 365 is totally confusing — it’s hard to tell which figures are associated with which text.

I’m not offering rewards like Donald Knuth, sorry…

I will place a list of errata on the official …

My post on what it’s like to write a technical book was a stream-of-consciousness look at the process of writing High Performance MySQL, Second Edition. I got a lot of responses from it and learned some neat things I wouldn’t have learned if I hadn’t written the post. I also got a lot of questions, and my editor wrote a response too. I want to follow up on these things.

Was I fair, balanced and honest?

I really intended to write the post as just “here’s what it’s like, just so you’re prepared.” But at some point I got really deep into it and lost my context. That’s when I started to write about the things that didn’t go so smoothly with the publisher, …

The book, that is. My dog is already studying it. You should buy a few copies for yourself, your family, and all your pets.

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As you probably know, I recently finished writing a book with a few co-authors. I kept notes along the way and wanted to describe the process for those who are thinking about writing a book, too.

Update: see the followup post for more of the story, including my editor’s responses.

I think it’s important to be objective; my purpose here is to help prospective authors get a feeling of what it’s like, and it’s not all good (but I’d encourage people to do it anyway). Hopefully I won’t come off as sounding peeved at anyone or like I’m trying to put people down. I’ll have a lot to say about what went right and wrong, and how it helped and hindered the process.

Please excuse the rambling nature of this post. I’d love to …

Final versions of High Performance MySQL, Second Edition sample content are posted at the official website. You can download unrestricted PDFs of the foreword, table of contents, chapter 4 (Query Performance Optimization), and the index.

PDF, Sample Chapter

Today High Performance MySQL, Second Edition went to press. I’ve been working with the production team over the last couple of weeks, proofreading and checking the index and working with the artist who re-drew the illustrations.

I spoke to the production editor this morning and she told me the schedule is for the bound-book date to be the 16th of June. The official in-stock date is June 19th. I don’t know how many copies they’re printing for the first printing. But I think there have been a lot of pre-orders (rumors I’ve heard from my Amazon Affiliate account).

I cannot wait to hold my copy in my hands!

Publishing