Well, since Jeremy said something, I guess I can now say something as well. :)
Jeremy asked me to help him work on his (now our) book, High Performance MySQL, for O'Reilly.
Jeremy's the brains (and the blame) behind the whole plan, though, although I think if I remember correctly, I can take credit for the banner at the top of the cover.
At some point, when ORA starts taking pre-orders for it, there'll be a gratuitous link here, so that I can try to guilt trip visitors into buying it. If you visit both my site and Jeremy's site, I feel it's only fair that you buy a copy from each of them. ;-)
Well, I was going to buy one anyway. After all the bargin bandwith he throws my way, it's the very least I could do for the guy. :)
I told him this a few weeks ago when he showed me the cover, but it's worth telling again. The Sparrow Hawk is the smallest, and weakest, of all raptors. A much better option would have been the Peregrine Falcon. Not only is it the mascot for our University, but as the fastest known animal it better represents the point of the book.
Of course, that would presume some correlation between an ORA cover and its contents.
Yeah, but the name of the bird is a trick for this book, I think.
"So, what kind of animal is on the cover of your O'Reilly book?", says PostgreSQL guru.
"A sparrow-", you begin.
"A-ha! A weak little animal befitting your weak little database-", says PostgreSQL guru.
"-hawk", you finish.
It's a bird name that bridges the world of the small and elusive to the predatory and deadly. Just as MySQL straddles (more than ever these days) the worlds between small fast SQL-enriched filesystem and foreign-key-enabled subqueryable view-controlled relational superstart.
Better than an extinct animal on the cover anyways, like the mastodon on PostgreSQL's book. Bad omen there.
I think a hummingbird would have been most appropiate...
Congrats. First books are hard. Not that I'd know. First kids are hard though, just found that out this week :o
JCW, my first kid has been a breeze. It's been so easy (relative to what I was led to expect) that I don't want to have another, for fear of things actually being difficult. :)