If you’re going to use MySQL to display information on the web or in another application, you will eventually--sooner rather than later--need to understand the structure of your database and how to construct SQL queries.
Two of the most common applications you’ll use with MySQL are PHP and Dreamweaver. PHP is a programming language, which means you need to understand PHP first. But as soon as you start using MySQL with PHP, you run into the mysql_query() function. PHP has pretty much no built-in MySQL functionality. You construct a MySQL query, give that to PHP, and PHP hands it, intact, to the MySQL server.
Dreamweaver will insulate you from MySQL queries for the first few minutes. But as soon as you start doing anything out of the ordinary, you’ll run up against the “advanced” section of your recordset window. That “SELECT .... FROM... WHERE” phrase in the advanced window is nearly a pure MySQL query.
Much of this is inter-related. If you click the “code” button on a Dreamweaver page you’ve added a recordset to, you’ll see PHP code. Dreamweaver creates the PHP code for you.
MySQL is a way of storing databases. Each database contains tables. Each table contains rows and each row contains columns. Rows and columns might be more familiar to you as records and fields.
MySQL is only a database application. It contains no user interface of its own. It does ship with a sample command-line application, but this is really meant as a programming sample so that programmers can write better interfaces for MySQL.
The on-line documentation for MySQL is available at http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/. The on-line documentation is very comprehensive and useful. If you want print documentation, I recommend the New Riders book, “MySQL” by Paul DuBois. It is a well-written reference to using MySQL that covers the issues most likely to arise.
Another great place for MySQL information for Mac OS X is at Marc Liyanage’s MySQL page, http://www.entropy.ch/software/macosx/mysql/.