I am trying to assign the password to the root user via phpMyAdmin as explained in Appendix A on page 432 - I referred back to page 428 to gain access to use phpMyAdmin.
When I try to open the link in my browswer - I get this error
#2002 - The server is not responding (or the local MySQL server's socket is not correctly configured)
Connection for controluser as defined in your configuration failed.
I googled the error and someone said to replace the http://localhost/phpMyAdmin with http://127.0.0.1/phpmyadmin/
I did that and it worked. Why?