Sorry about title:

(1) Does anyone (everyone?) use phpMyAdmin? Is it brilliant/indispensible/useful/just more bother?

(I've investigated this a bit, found an online demo, and it looks as though it would be a great time-saving tool. But I'm still hoping for comments from actual users.)


(2) Does anyone have a MySQL reference book recommendation?

This one _looks_ good:
http://www.amazon.com/SQL-MySQL-Developers...e/dp/0131497359

... but I do wonder - it's over 1000 pages. K&R's C book is 250, Stroustrup's C++ book is 300, can there really be 3+ times as much information? Most computer books I've looked at in the last 20 years have been desperately dilute, with the stream-of-consciousness writing style. Would this be different?

Grateful for suggestions.

Well, never mind. I discovered that pair.com, my hosting service, has phpMyAdmin preinstalled, so I went ahead and used it. About as I expected, it's going to save time for odd-job DB tables.

Sorry for the silly title - I never understood JOINs properly, and that's what I'd really like suggestions on. A reference book might be a timesaver over trying to find a decent tutorial: it's in areas like this that it seems to be hard to find a way through the junk to the gems.

I always use http://w3schools.com/sql/default.asp as my reference.