Feedback after a 15 minute review

[gitgithan]

I am giving feedback assuming you want to maximize the impact of the book though great presentation, instead of treating it as a collection of notes for reflection by a limited group of people.

I am contributing some ideas from my experience in course development and teaching, if they don't align with the goals of this book, it's ok to push my ideas aside.

1. The file naming does not help sorting (eg. Chapter10 is before Chapter2 now). Someone browsing github would have to go back to README.md to navigate or to eyeball again/ctrl+f to find the chapter.

2. What are the pre-requisites for readers?
   Mysql written in C/C++, do readers need that?
   If yes, what concepts in those languages are relevant?
   What are the books that someone should have already read, and tasks already completed to be able to make good use of this book?
   The preface includes "Computer Science Students", is it PHD/Grad/Undergrad?
   Has there been feedback gathered from Computer Science Students?
   If students do deal with such, linking to university course codes can help readers self-fill pre-requisite knowledge.

3. Are the contents relevant to other RDBMS or Nosql?
   This helps readers who come from other databases (assuming the target audience is not only MySQL users).
   My concern is what if what the book is teaching is a quirk specific to (a particular version of) MySQL, then the effort learning would not be transferrable to new databases.

4. Chapter 1 went 0 to 100kmph in 2 seconds. It felt like a collection of edge case problems. There are a lot of technical details, but not enough motivation about what problem they address.
   I'm not sure:

• in what real world scenarios these problems appear
• how often does each type appear
• for what kinds of applications or usage characteristics they appear
• what are the related problems (a mindmap/hierarchy/fault tree).
  So I don't know how/why solving them can help solve other related problems.

If the problem caused a real issue, are there links to github issues/PR/RFC to get more context?
I wish the book began with a mindmap like README of https://github.com/gvwilson/sdxpy which helps readers reason why chapters are ordered in a certain way.
Then for each chapter, it starts with a list of learning goals, ends with a list of solutions ordered from worst to best, or a table of tradeoffs after considering all solutions, and some unanswered questions (whether that's theoretical, engineering or political obstacle).

Something that may be helpful is imagine this material would be condensed into a talk/tutorial at a conference, how would the proposal look like?
Example pycon talk proposals: https://github.com/akaptur/pycon-proposals
Example tutorial proposals: https://us.pycon.org/2024/speaking/tutorials/samples/index.html

That could help strengthen the organization/motivation aspects of bringing users along the ride with the book.
I'm sure someone who is working as a MySQL DBA with a family to support and risk being laid off if he can't solve the problems described in the book would want to read this, but if considering to grow the audience pool, maybe adding some of the supporting elements aforementioned could help. Probably even charging for it is possible if it becomes highly rated as a university course reference textbook.

[wangbin579]

Thank you very much for your valuable suggestions. Your advice has really opened up my thinking.

I am currently working on building learning materials and animations, and once they are completed, they will be paired with the book to provide a stronger foundation for readers' learning.

I will also make further improvements to the book based on your suggestions. Thank you again!