I'm new to using a database, specifically MySQL. I'm creating a web application for class in which you can look up the name of a book and it'll display the summary of the book. My question is should I send a query to the database that collects all of the books' data on initialization and put them into a HashMap inside a manager class for lookup or should I use a query each time to lookup a specific book information?
It depends on the data transport time I would say. If your average query time times the number of request goes faster than a script to put everything into a HashMap, use queries. Otherwise, use a script that collects everything and puts it into a HashMap.
But if you have thousands of rows, you should use queries, because otherwise you will use too much RAM.