MySQL is a harsh mistress. You must love it, or it will hurt you very badly. Love it! Now worship it, you pig!

I’ve been doing a crash course in mySQL for the past few days (can you tell I’m getting a bit punchy?), and asked the kind, gracious, and exceedingly sanguine members of the webdesign-L mailing list to recommend books and online resources that would help. Here are some of the links they showered on me:

mySQL.com :: The official mySQL site. You must go here first, to be amazed and overawed. And deeply puzzled. Actually it’s not that bad; look at part 3 of the online manual for a pretty good SQL tutorial with occasionally mangled English.

SQL Tutorial, Part 1 :: A very good introductory tutorial, with an online DB you can mess with (although I haven’t tried to actually do this yet). Seems to be part of internet.com.

SQL Tutorial, Part 1 :: Part II of the internet.com SQL tutorial.

evolt: SQL Resources :: Very good list of links to more SQL resources at evolt.

Building a Database-Driven Web Site :: This one was right at the level I needed; probably the most well-written and in-depth series, covering development of a relational Jokes database. Gets into some more advanced concepts such as lookup tables. Really good.

Index of Developer Shed MySQL articles :: Looks good, but I haven’t even started to look through any of them yet.