This book is for a wide range of readers. MySQL database administrators and developers who have worked on earlier versions of MySQL will learn about the features of MySQL 8 and how they can leverage them. For readers who worked on other RDBMSes such as Oracle, MSSQL, PostgreSQL, and Db2 this book will be a quick start guide to MySQL 8. For beginners, this book serves as a handbook; they can refer to the recipes and find quick solutions to their problems.
Most importantly, this book makes you production-ready. After reading this book, you will be confident in handling busy database servers with large datasets.
In my 10 years of experience with MySQL, I have witnessed small mistakes leading to major outages. In this book, many scenarios where a mistake can be made are covered and put under a warning label.
The topics are introduced in such a way that a beginner need not go back and forth to understand the concepts. A reference link to the MySQL documentation or any other source is provided for each topic, and the reader can refer to the link for more details.
Since this book is written to suit beginners as well, there may be a few recipes on topics you already know; feel free to skip them.