Many people have (or use) a summer reading list. I’ve never done that until now. I’ve got a 3 foot stack of books I’ve purchased in the last couple of months sitting beside my bed. I thought it might be helpful (maybe only for me) to review a few of those books.

Among the books in my pile is Blue Like Jazz. I’ve gotten about 11 chapters into the book & my son has borrowed it. Donald Milller has a wonderful fresh voice and has thought deeply about what it means to be Christian. One note of caution : DON’T READ THIS BOOK IF YOU’RE AFRAID OF CHANGE. If Miller hasn’t stood your world on it’s head by page 30, check your pulse…

David Murrow has written a great book about men and the church. Specifically about what keeps men from becoming involved in Church. He spends some time talking about various trends of church attendance and the make-up of churches. He also talks about some generalized differences between men & women that lend themselves to a gender gap in church. The book ends with some specific recommendations for church that would make church more attractive to the “average Joe�.
The book is well written and a quick read. It is a must read for anyone looking to involve more men in ministry.

I recently tuned one of my MySQL Servers at work. I used the O’Reilly book “High Performance MySQL” by Jeremy D. Zawodny & Derek J. Balling. I found the book to be very helpful in understanding the different storage engines available within MySQL, and their correct application to real world applications. I got as far as the chapter on indexes and had already solved my bottleneck problem.

The chapter on backups & recovery was especially helpful. I will typically use a mysqldump for each database initiated with a cron statement. I’ll create a date stamped tarball of the dump files and move them to CD-ROM. In really large databases, restoration can be a problem, so I’ve set up mysqldumps of individual tables. These can then be loaded individually when only one table has been mangled.