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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Book review, April 6, 2011
This review is from: Beginning Oracle Application Express 4 (Paperback)
If you are thinking about developing a product with Application Express this book is a great place to start. It is a complete hands-on book. You will work through the examples and exercises. Example code is available at the website from the publisher. ([...]) Downloadable code and exercises make the book very valuable for learning Application Express. It is really practical and covering almost all the essential application development aspects. You will learn Step by Step from this book with little knowledge of PL/SQL, HTML and JavaScript. A ticket system for a help desk is created from scratch. In every chapter of the book, a part of the help system is built. The book starts by making a description of the requirements of the help desk system and to create a database design. This book also covers the steps of creating an entity relationship diagram. Good database design is the key to creating a successful application, especially with Application Express in mind. The necessary database tables used in the ERD are created in Sql*workshop. Sql*workshop and not the ERD tool is used because the objects are created from scratch. With the basic data created, a shell is generated for the ticket system. This will be done with the options available in Application Express. After the shell is created for the application, the application is extended with forms, reports, and charts. The strength of this book is that the theoretical part is completely integrated in the exercises. This makes the book even more valuable. When the basic part of the application is built, there is also a chapter about more advanced techniques within forms and reports. It helps to understand Application Express even better and look behind the scenes. Programmatic elements in Application Express can provide both simple and complex features to the Application Express framework. So the helpdesk application is extended with conditions, validations on item level and page level, tabular form validations, computations and processes and dynamic actions. Security in an application is often an afterthought. This book covers this very important topic. The key features of security available within Application Express are added to the application. Authentication is added to the help desk application by making use of a customized authentication scheme. The scheme is used to allow control over users who access the sensitive parts of the application. User access is controlled by access control lists. In the help desk application a check sum is added to the URL. This prevents URL tampering. Once the application is ready, it needs to be deployed. So you learn how to get an application out of the system and to deploy in the production system. Techniques like export, import, and supporting objects are covered. Websheets is a new feature in Application Express 4. In the book, you will use the features to build a websheet application from scratch. With the application you can manage your corporate soccer team. Websheets is a very nice feature to manage the soccer team. A complete example how to manage the soccer team is covered in this book. Advanced development features are also highlighted in this book. These tools help when dealing with large applications. Features like page locks, application and page groups are covered. Of course, your Application Express side needs to be monitored as well. Each time a page is accessed, a log entry is stored. Subjects like activity logging, login attempts, and managing workspaces are covered in the book. The last chapter in the book is about the team development feature. Team development is a tool for managing Application Express projects. All features like milestones, to-dos, bugs, feedback and features are discussed. Summarized: This book is a `must' for people starting to work and develop applications in Application Express.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Great book, but needs two more edits, April 15, 2011
This review is from: Beginning Oracle Application Express 4 (Paperback)
This book provides an excellent start for the novice developer trying to learn APEX 4.0. Chapters are very clear and well-organized. The continuing exercize throughout the book is quite a challenge and demonstrates much of the functionality of APEX. Overall, an excellent job. However (you knew this was coming), I couldn't give it 5 stars for two main reasons. 1. Too many simple editing mistakes. Although, for the most part, they don't impact the overall quality, they are at a minimum annoying, and at their worst confusing to the reader. I found 7 simple errors in the first 30 pages. 2. The exercises needed somebody (not an author) to go through once and identify all the problems. Is the column in the TICKETS table DESCR or DESCRIPTION? Really needs one more look by a technical editor. All that said, I would still highly recommend it. I plan on using the book as the basis for my APEX 4 classes that I teach. I am hopeful that the errors can be easily fixed in the pdf or kindle versions.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
It's how a "beginning" book should be written, April 17, 2011
This review is from: Beginning Oracle Application Express 4 (Paperback)
This books is written for someone who is new to Oracle's Application Express (ApEx) RAD development tool. To follow along with the book you will either need to have Oracle and ApEx installed (easy to follow instructions on setting ApEx up are included in the ApEx download from Oracle), or sign up for an account online (see book for web site). I had installed ApEx on my machine prior to getting the book but I also used the online service to test it out. Signing up for a workspace online took just a few minutes and my account was created within a few minutes. The book starts out giving an introduction to ApEx, what it is and where it got it's beginnings. The second chapter walks you through the UI and helps to get you acquainted with things. From there you begin your journey into building a help desk/ticketing system from the ground up. Each chapter walks you through the different aspects of building your application. The authors walk you through using the wizards to build up most of what you need, and then show you how to make changes to the wizard's code so you can tweak whatever you might need to fit your standards. First you learn how to use ApEx to create your database objects and how to import and run scripts that were created outside the platform. From there you are shown how to build your application, navigation and import data from spreadsheets. After that you are walked through two chapters on building reports and forms. Once you've learned that you learn about the programmatic abilities in ApEx such as conditionally showing pages, computing and validating values and setting up processes and actions. Security is next on the list and how to set it up on your application. Finally you are shown how to deploy your finished application. The next two chapters explain how to build a websheet application which the authors liken to a blog or wiki site. From there you move onto a chapter dealing with advanced developers tools such as locking pages (all ApEx work is done in a browser interface and there is no source control), monitoring your application, setting up your build options, etc. The last two chapters deal with managing workspaces inside of ApEx and how Team Development can help keep things straight. I really like the book and it's step by step setting up of an application. The authors did a good job at showing a beginner what they need to know to get a basic application set up and deployed. I feel they gave enough "hand holding" in the earlier chapters and in the later chapters just referred you back to where you could find the instructions if you forgot how to do something. They obviously didn't touch on everything that ApEx can do and left that for other books to explain, which is how it should be for a book like this. There are more typos in this book than I have seen in other Apress titles. Most of these are nothing more than mere annoyances in the text, but there are a couple coding errors that I noticed and a couple places that refer you to later chapters but still had the '??' place holders since the layout had not been completed yet. Even with these issues, the book is definitely worth reading for those who want to learn about using ApEx for driving their web site.
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