Back in May, FLOSSUK published a couple of reviews that I had written in their newsletter. Reviewing books is a pleasant way to expand one’s technical horizons, especially for a confirmed bibliophile like me.

The books I reviewed were You don’t know JS: ES 6 and Beyond, by Kyle Simpson and Learning MySQL and MariaDB, by Russel J.T. Dyer. ES6 and Beyond was a very detailed look at new language features that have been added to ECMAScript 6. The You don’t know JS series was financed by crowdfunding; a process which I believe will become more and more popular in the future and not an unproblematic process. Of its content I had this to say

Clearly this is not the book for you if you want to “Learn JavaScript in N hours/days”; it is aimed at those who want to understand the whole language deeply and it is certainly comprehensive. Indeed, this volume could function as much as a reference as a tutorial.

The other tome Learning MySQL and MariaDB was a rather more introductory sort of volume. I have been working with MySQL since around the turn of the millenium, so it came as rather a relief that there was very little material within with which I was unfamiliar. Nevertheless Dyer does a fine job of introducing the world’s most widely deployed (citation probably needed) RDBMS. I evaluated it thus

If you haven’t worked with MySQL or if you want a solid tutorial for a new developer, then Learning MySQL and MariaDB would be a good choice of book to start off with.

Here is an embed of the May FLOSSUK newsletter.