Apache Derby: Off to the Races in the (paper) flesh!

Yes, sirs and madams, it is the official hard-bound 500+ page book known as Apache Derby: Off to the Races -- the book that gives you everything you need to know to develop applications with this scrupulously standards-compliant little database (and even do a little administration of this normally zero-administration beastie).

As you may already know, I wrote a good chunk of this book: chapters on PHP, Perl, Python, ODBC network communication, maintenance, and tuning. It was written during a time that was pretty gruelling for me, personally and professionally, and at times it felt like it would never end -- but now that I can hold the thing in my hands, it seems worthwhile. (I hope Lynn thinks so as well!) And the experience of working with Paul and George was something that I'm glad to have had as well; I've learned a lot from them.

So: if you don't have your own copy yet, it's time to buy a copy (yep, and if you use that link you'll even contribute an extra couple of pennies to my pocket).

Glitches

Ah yes, I have found a glitch already. Actually I had half suspected this was coming, due to the last-minute change I requested to keep pace with the rapid pace of PHP Data Objects (PDO) development and evolution... a global change to using class constants in PDO (from PDO_ATTR_BLAH to PDO::ATTR_BLAH) happened about a day before our final proofs were being sent off to the printer. I asked for the corresponding global change, and, of course, the name of the PDO_ODBC module now reads PDO::ODBC. It's not the end of the world, but it's a tiny bit embarassing.