Books on Databases

[Solfius]

Can anyone recomend any books that teach the fundamentals of databases? Their design, how they work, what they are used for etc, as opposed to how to program for them in a specific language?

[Cosmo Harrigan]

I know you asked for a book describing their fundamentals, but I thought I would also include this:

http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/pro ... rial4.html

It was a somewhat useful tutorial that helped me when I first used PHP and MySQL.

[Solfius]

could be useful, thanks.

It's just what I'm wary of doing is buying a book that tells me everything I need to know about scripting and coding for databases and database driven web-sites, but not having a clue how to implement this and apply it and design good solid databases and sites using them. A bit like when I got a book on how to use Dreamweaver UltraDev, at that time I didn't know any HTML, so the book was worthless as it assumed prior knowledge.