Customer Reviews

CodeNotes for Oracle 9i

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If you already know Oracle 7x or 8x, you won't benefit as much from this book as you will from Oracle 9i New Features by Robert G. Freeman (ISBN 0072223855). However, if you're coming from a SQL Server, Sybase or other RDBMS environment, or are a developer who needs to quickly learn Oracle this is an ideal book.

You'll need a basic understanding of both relational databases and programming to effectively use this book. Although both topics are briefly covered, the book's pace is quick and it goes surprisingly deep into knowledge and skill factors needed to work with Oracle 9i.

Although this book is written for working professionals, it employs excellent learning techniques, such as exercises and self-tests. It's tempting to bypass them and just plough through the information, but I recommend that you work through them because you'll come away with a much deeper understanding of Oracle 9i - and will do so in less than a weekend.

The range of topics covered is what makes this book special - in less than 200 pages the book provides practical and relatively detailed information on SQL*Plus and PL/SQL, how Oracle 9i works, and even goes into tuning.

This is the first book I've read in the CodeNote series, and if the rest of the books are as well written and presented as this one I'll turn to them first when I need to become quickly functional in a particular technology.

I bought this book to get some info on Oracle 9i to see how it was structured. It was good for explaining the terminology and showed some screenshots. But this book will not get you started using Oracle9i, it only
helps you to understand some of the syntax.

If you have a strong knowledge of SQL, then find another book, this book covers alot of java and xml explaination when dealing with 9i.

In short, if you are curious about using Oracle 9i, this book delivers
but if you want to learn the software, get another book.

The book is well written and easy to read, but it fell way short of my expectations because of its brevity. You really have to consider who this book is intended for before purchasing it. I expected it to be a summary of the most important operating aspects and gotchas with Oracle. Instead, the beef inside the bun amounted to about 100 pages that started off with a description of SELECT statements. This was way too basic for what I needed. For someone who just wants an overview of Oracle, then thisbook would probably suffice. But if you want an overview because you want to learn how to use Oracle, then chances are you're going to want much more than what this book offers. I purchased this book because it was not the behemeth volume so many authors like to produce. I give this author credit for creating something digestible. For me, however, this was just an appetizer that I had to send back to the kitchen for something heartier.

Without wasting a lot of space on screen shots, this book provides step by step instructions for downloading and installing Oracle on both Linux and Windows and then using it. It explains new Oracle features such as the timestamp datatype and generally gets the novice up and running quickly. Everything else that you need is in the online/CD-ROM docs. If you're going to administer a production database yourself you'd probably want the Oracle Press dba book. If you're going to continue using Oracle you probably also want the bone-crushing Oracle Press "complete reference" book. But start with this one.