Instant Innodb, by Matt Reid

This book does a good job of explaining the InnoDB internals. I have found particularly useful the section where it describe in detail all the server variables affecting InnoDB. Although these variables are also in the MySQL manual, some of them have never been explained to me as thoroughly as this book as done.

The title claims that it is a InnoDB reference. If is more than that, as the reference part id covered in three chapters. The rest of the book gives useful advice on maintenance, monitoring, and troubleshooting.

As most people still do I learned to read using books. WhooHoo!

Books are nice. Besides reading them they are also a nice decoration on your shelf. There is a brilliant TED talk by Chip Kidd on this subject.

But sometimes books have drawbacks. This is where I have to start the comparison with vinyl records (Yes, you're still reading a database oriented blog). Vinyl records look nice and are still being sold and yes I also still use them. The drawback is that car dealers start to look puzzeled if you ask them if your new multimedia system in your car is able to play your old Led Zeppelin records. The market for portable record players is small, and that's for a good reason.

The problem with books about databases is that they get old very soon. …

Here are some of the fake O'Reilly book covers I mentioned in a prior post.  These have been optimized for use as black & white Kindle screensaver wallpaper images.  If you haven't done so already, you can install a Kindle screensaver hack with a couple of downloads. 

Update: I've embedded a slideshow from PicasaWeb, but it requires Flash.  If you don't see it you can click on the links below to go directly to PicasaWeb.

• Kindle hacks:  …

Read the original article at Book Review – Help! by Oliver Burkeman

Help! How To Become Slightly Happier and Get a Bit More Done

I've long overcome that sheepish feeling when browsing the Self-help section at the bookstore. Sure, How to Make Friends and Influence People or the Seven Steps to World Domination in your bookcase aren't exactly the sort of titles to suggest a deep intellect but I like to keep an open mind when checking out the latest hardcover secret to happiness and prosperity. Basically I try not to diss a book just because it's got "soup" on the cover.

I will concede that publishers have …

Here's an interview with Nicolas Pujol who has written an excellent new book called "The Mind Share Market."  Nicolas and I were colleagues at MySQL for several years and we often discussed the role of our free open source product as a way to gain market share in the commercial sector.  In MySQL's case, our goal was to be the #1 choice for web developers worldwide both in the free and the commercial market.  Over the years, the notion of having a free product has transcended Open Source and now has many more applications in other markets.  It can be quite …

IBM's Watson natural language Question & Answer system made headlines recently with its primetime debut on Jeopardy.  Despite a few embarassing answers, Watson trounced top Jeopardy players Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings.  Watson is built from 90 IBM Power 750 IBM Linux servers with 16 terabytes of memory providing 80 Teraflops of processing power.  Watson is perhaps the most famous "Big Data" systems out there.  Watson's knowledge base consists of 200 million pages of text data that is pre-processed using  …

I have just returned from holiday and while it’s not normal reading during some of my spare time I managed to read a couple of books on IPv6 I’d recently bought to get me up to scratch and refresh my memory on the topic.

These books are:

• Deploying IPv6 Networks, by Cisco
• Understanding IPv6, Second Edition by Microsoft

The first book is quite good, and while a little old provided a good solid background for me on the subject. A lot of the information was not relevant to my interest in setting up a networked SOHO network but that’s not really a problem. The background was interesting.

The second book was a bit of a mistake. I’d ordered it as it was a …

In case you haven't figured it out, I'm a fan of Guy Kawasaki and his "How to Change the World " blog.  If you like his blog, you should check out his book "Reality Check."  Yes, you can read most of the content for free on the web, but sometimes a printed copy is more convenient.   Like if you're on an airplane.  Or on the toilet.  Or if you want to underline it.  Or if you want to underline it while you're on the toilet on an airplane.  Ok, you get the idea. 

The book covers some of the best items from his blog, categorized into themes like starting a company, raising money, business planning, innovation, marketing, schmoozing, management, hiring and firing and more. It's not a bunch of high-falutin' theories either. It's hard …

Here I listed some programming and web related books those I found important for knowledge/skills/career whatever you said. Some of the books I read completely and some books partially. But all of these books I found very helpful to increase knowledge.

PHP

Here's another interesting session from the South by Southwest Interactive conference a few weeks ago... Dharmesh Shah, co-author of the Inbound Marketing book, gave a concise, high-speed presentation on some of the best practices in social media marketing.  Here are a couple of video clips from his session:

A lot of the startups I work with, both open source companies and SaaS, are now taking Inbound Marketing more seriously as a way to grow their business, whether it's an open source business, cloud, SaaS or some combination.  The reality is it's just not good enough to have a killer product.  You need to have a dialog with prospects and make sure …