Vikram Vaswani is the founder and CEO of Melonfire, a company specializing in software consultancy, content creation, and content syndication services. He is a passionate proponent of the open-source movement and frequently contributes articles and tutorials on open-source technologies (including Perl, Python, PHP, MySQL, and Linux) to the community at large through his weekly column in the Melonfire Community. His last book was XML and PHP.

Vikram has over eight years of experience in the IT world, and has spent six of those years interacting with the MySQL RDBMS as user, administrator, and application developer. He has deployed MySQL in a variety of environments, including corporate intranets, high-traffic Internet web sites and mission-critical thin client applications� experience which came in handy while authoring this book! He continues to be a vocal advocate of MySQL in his role as software consultant.

When not plotting to rule the world from a heavily-guarded conference room at Melonfire HQ, Vikram amuses himself by reading, sleeping, watching old movies, playing squash, fiddling with his ever-growing collection of electronic gadgets, and keeping an eye out for unfriendly Agents.

About the Technical Editors

Alexander "Sasha" Pachev worked for MySQL Inc. between 2000 and 2003 with the development, support, and sales teams. He implemented the replication feature in the server, handled numerous support cases, and did a fair amount of consulting. Sasha is currently working as the IT Director at SurveyPro.Com.

Brian Kaney, co-founder of Vermonster LLC, graduated from the University of Massachusetts with a bachelor�s degree in engineering. While in college, he worked as a consultant for various companies in New England. He later co-founded Askfor.com, piloting a new middleware technology. In 2000 he co-founded Vermonster, a consulting company located in Boston, focusing on open software and open standards for the enterprise. When not thinking of new and exciting ways to use open solutions, Brian enjoys riding his single-speed mountain bicycle and watching Formula 1.

Jay Powers is a graduate of the University of Vermont and has been working with open source technology for over seven years. He is experienced in designing and building web applications and web services. Before starting Vermonster, he worked as a technology director at Askfor.com, an Internet startup company. Prior to that, he worked as a director at AdSmart, a CMGI company. When Jay is not writing code, he enjoys riding around Boston on his fixed-gear Pinarello bicycle.

Arjen Lentz works for MySQL AB as lead technical writer for the MySQL documentation team. He also teaches MySQL training courses, gives talks and tutorials on MySQL at conferences and user group meetings, and maintains contacts with the MySQL and Open Source community in Australia.

About the Publisher

McGraw-Hill/Osborne Media, a unit of McGraw-Hill Education, is a leading publisher of self-paced computer training materials, including user and reference guides, best-selling series on computer certification, titles on business & technology, and high-level but practical titles on networking, programming, and Web development tools. McGraw-Hill/Osborne Media is the official press of Oracle, Corel, and Intuit. For more information, visit www.osborne.com.