I definetly recommend this book to beginners, i knew nothing about MySQL before reading this book and now i know almost everything i need to know. Very good editing and full of examples, covers nicely Perl and Phyton API's. Only thing that i would change about this book, its that i would put "Administration" part as a first part of the book not the last one. And only thing thats missing is Java API examples. It would be definetly nice to have some. But i still think that this book is one of the greatest.