Skip the book. Find, read, and 'do' a few online tutorials, and you'll know over 90% of what you need to get going. Pick one specific to your engine of choice (MySQL in this case, it seems) and just go with it.
The old ESPN site was just god-awful. This new one is better. I'll still probably never visit, but at least now I'll call it that "less awful site I never go to" instead of that 'horrible horrible site I never go to' :-).
Just start writing, using whatever works best for you. I've been using TextEdit on the mac a lot lately for my writing, but anything's good.
If you're writing for a publisher, then they're going to give you a template that's probably for Word, and you don't have to worry about complicated document struturing stuff -- they'll help with the referencing, etc.
If you're doing it all yourself, then a document description system such as LaTeX might be the way to go. If I was writing a technical book that i knew had little chance of being published, I'd probably use that.
"Just start writing" is pretty terrible advice for writing a non-fiction book. The greatest value of such a book is in the synthesis of the subject at hand... without high level organisation, that synthesis simply won't be. Chaotic, messy non-fiction is terrible.
Fiction writing, on the other hand, can go totally chaotic... but I imagine the OP is talking about non-fiction.
An "old" method used to be to put individual items on notecards. These could be rearranged repeatedly, with additional cards inserted as ideas were either fleshed out or fit into a larger context.
It's writing, but not (yet) writing a linear, not to mention final, draft.
I understand that these days some people work in a similar fashion, but with Post It notes. The advantage being that you can spread them out over a table or wall or similar (walls are then a convenient source or otherwise unoccupied surface area), and they won't be as easily inadvertently jostled out of order.
If you are worried about losing a card organization scheme, when they are laid out in such fashion you can take picture(s) in order to preserve a record. This can also serve as a backup mechanism against losing the cards.
It also works for handwritten notes. You do not need to spend a lot of time on the pictures if that time is not productive. But the pictures are so easy to take -- one can just snap them at the end of each day or workday. If your 4 year old randomizes your stack, or you forget your notebook while juggling 3 other things, all is not lost. If that never happens, all you've lost is a couple of minutes' clicking and some non-volatile memory capacity.
Behind all these comments, is the fact that for me, writing long hand is still sometimes most productive. If the volume of output is less, the concentration tends to be higher. And it can be accomplished most anywhere, at a moment's notice.
There's also the kinesthetic aspect of long hand, to which I respond strongly. Knowing one's learning and interaction style may be helpful. For me, a physical relationship/interaction drives heightened awareness. Others may be more visual, or acoustic. I wonder whether personal recorders / voice notetaking devices work particularly well for the latter.
Perhaps this is one of the situations where "build one to throw away" is good advice. Once you've spent four weeks writing a sketchy book-length ramble on your subject of choice, you'll have a much better idea of the size of the task ahead of you, and plenty of ideas on how a much better book on the same subject would be arranged and written.
Then, don't start rewriting your manuscript. Burn it and start all over again.
I've never written a book, but I plan to eventually, and this is the approach I plan to take.
I actually wrote some 150 pages of a first (technical) book before sending out proposals to 10-15 publishers to which I received a resounding ... nothing. I think maybe one rejection.
After a year of feeling a little bummed about it, I tried again, this time pre-clearing topics with the publishers and got a proposal accepted.
But the advice that stuck with me is to just write. Sure, plan out what you're going to write ( topics + sub-topics for non-fiction, storyboard for fiction), but otherwise, just let the words flow. You're going to butcher the crap out of it later on when you start editing it anyway, so don't _start_ by worrying about it.
Firefox is a -beast- on the mac. It drags and constantly seems to be using 5% of CPU, doesn't do fonts right, and hangs and lags a lot. So, i use Safari about 80% of the time.
However, it's got a lot of great plugins, so I use it for any questionable stuff and for proxied traffic, etc.
I would pretend that I was seriously considering it, and then would find something that was nearly as good and never come back.
cf. Salon.com (despite the fact that it went free years ago)