Ronald Bradford is a busy man. He has just finished Effective MySQL: Optimizing SQL Statements, the first in a series of MySQL books.
There is a sample chapter at the link above.
The chapters on indexing will be valuable to novices. Ronald has distilled his presentation on the use of EXPLAIN into chapter that should be made mandatory reading. The book is free of fluff and full of information that you will reference well after the initial reading.
For those of you at Oracle Open World, this book and others are heavily discounted in the bookstore on the second level of Moscone West, near the MySQL Community Kiosk.
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I will be presenting at Oracle Open World but my presentation is not designed for a MySQL Audience. MySQL for Oracle DBAs or Speaking MySQL for Beginners will help Oracle DBAs embrace MySQL. Many Oracle shops also have MySQL and 11G or RAC DBAs can easily add MySQL skills to their existing set but can benefit from some gentle nudges in the right direction to get them started. Look for Session 15143 on Tuesday at 3:30 in Golden gate B at the Marriott Marquis. And do not forget the community reception after!
Be sure to drop by the MySQL Demo Pod while you are attending Oracle Open World. There you will see a demo of the changes in MySQL Cluster 7.2. My favorite part of this release is that you can access the same data via SQL, LDAP, REST, memcached or via APIs. You get the best of both SQLand NoSQL worlds in one. At the Demo Pod, you can see how to see up multi-site clustering, simplified Active/Active replication, and how Adaptive Query Localization speed up joins. In the past, many cluster users avoid joins and simply used primary key or key/value pairs. But Adaptive Query Localization gets the data nodes to do more of the work in parallel.