For MySQL has published its docs this time in EPUB format, other docs formats are also available. CHM has been the de facto standard file format for help on windows. The CHM technology is getting a bit behind as more formats are available in the market that makes the document available on many different formats. Microsoft introduced a new successor format with windows Vista i.e AP Help but it doesn’t got the popularity, because of this many have started providing the docs in PDF format.

MySQL has been providing the the CHM file format docs but that has its own problems which require time to handle. With the increasing complexity and size of our documentation (the MySQL 5.1 Manual contains more than 1.6 million words now!), providing CHM has become more and more of a pain. MySQL has stopped shipping CHM with the MySQL Server on Windows months ago.

MySQL has started providing EPUB-format docs. EPUB (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPUB) is an open standard format for screen readers, mobile or not, and is fairly easy (and not resource-intensive!) to compile.

Go to http://dev.mysql.com/doc to grab MySQL documentation in EPUB format. To read EPUB on desktop machines, I use a Firefox add-on & calibre-0.7.17, unsurprisingly called epubreader, which loads EPUB documents fast and renders them nicely. That said, please be aware that EPUB can’t do anything about the fact that the MySQL Reference Manual is huge, so downloading it to a mobile device can take a while. The MySQL 5.1 Manual is currently a whopping 15 MB!