David Stokes - MySQL and JSON: A Practical Programming Guide

Dave Stokes started programming in FORTRAN on punch cards. Decades ago, he found an open-source database named MySQL. He formerly was a PHP programmer in the MySQL AB Certification Department and eventually was the MySQL Certification Manager for MySQL AB, Sun Microsystems, and Oracle. He has been a member of the MySQL Community Team for Oracle. His professional background includes organizations, ranging alphabetically, from the American Heart Association to Xerox and in areas ranging from anti-submarine warfare to web development.

After graduating in Management Information Technology, Frdric Descamps (@lefred) started his career as a developer for an ERP under HPUX. He then opted for a career in the world of open source by joining one of the first Belgian startups dedicated 100 percent to free projects around GNU/Linux. In 2011, Frdric joined Percona, one of the leading MySQL-based specialists. He decided to join the MySQL Community Team in 2016 as a MySQL Community Manager for EMEA and APAC. His blog, which is mostly dedicated to MySQL, is at lefred.be.

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This book is dedicated to my long-suffering wife, Carrie Stokes. In 2017, I rode more than 85,000 miles on American Airlines alone and was gone to too many conferences. And then when I get home I started spending more time closed away in my office to finish this book! She put up with a lot for my career and for this book and deserves a big thanks.

To my coworkersI joined MySQL as a PHP programmer in the Certification Division in 2007 after using the database for many years. Every MySQL-er has impressed me greatly, and I regularly feel like the dim bulb in a sea of shining neon lasers when we get together. To say MySQL has grown and thrived through the efforts of many persons is an understatement, and I am frankly humbled (and surprised) to be around you all.

To the MySQL CommunityI am routinely set to slack-jaw yokel mode when talking to members of the MySQL Community when they tell me what they are doing with this incredible database. You folks routinely come up with new ways and combinations of using MySQL that impress me.

To Lisa McClain and Claire Yee at McGraw-Hill EducationLisa did not laugh when I sent in pages of the early stages of this book, and both have guided me through the process of getting this book published.

Once upon a time, there was one computer. With the creation of a second computer, we experienced problems moving and sharing data between systems. It took decades of hard work, arguments, negotiations, and proposed standards, and a great deal of frustration, to get to the point where data transfer between systems is almost trivial. For many years, many very smart people argued over ASCII or EBCDIC character encoding, endianness of computer memory, and various standards such as the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) and the Extensible Markup Language (XML). Today, JavaScript Object Notation, or JSON, has become the favorite way to encode data for moving between various systems. JSON-encoded data has several advantages over previous efforts in that it is very human-readable, easy to parse with programs, and not overly complicated.