Open Source Web Development with LAMP: Using Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl, and PHP

5.2. Tutorial

Following the Swiss Army knife theory (20 percent of the functions give you 80 percent of the utility), a few SQL commands go a long way to facilitate learning MySQL/Perl/DBI.

To illustrate these, we create a simple database containing information about some (fictional) people. Eventually, we’ll show how to enter this information from a form on the Web (see Chapter 7), but for now we interface with SQL directly.

First, try to make a connection to our MySQL server as the root MySQL user:

$ mysql -u root
					

N

The MySQL root user is different from the Linux root user. The MySQL root user is used to administer the MySQL server only.

If you see the following output:

 ERROR 2002: Can’t connect to local MySQL server through socket ´/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock´(2) ...