Customer Reviews

Easy Oracle SQL: Get Started Fast Writing SQL Reports with SQL*Plus

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

For a beginner who is learning Databases, SQL and/or Oracle, this book is lacking.

I do agree that there are certain sections of text that are nicely done, explained, and illustrated. Unfortunately, they are wedged inbetween other sections where lots of confusing terminology and concepts are poorly explained. Normalization is squeezed into 5 pages. First experience getting signed onto SQLplus consumes several page or repetitive thoughts, but is not helpful in troubleshooting.

Get ready for the fire hose half way through Chapter 3 where the book covers varied types of table joins and subqueries without clearly explaining to the reader what's going on. It basically presents the syntax without explaining examples and situations where you'd want to use this feature. Table Joining is one of the most important concepts for report writers to master and the book fails to deliver.

Would have been better to delete Chapter 5 where the book takes a beginner through the rather advanced topics of differentiating between different types of indexes. bitmap versus b-tree versus function-based? If I'm just learning SQL, I'm not going to be making those design decisions quite yet. Use the extra pages here to better explain multi-table joins instead.

I also think they did a rush job getting this book out. Several of the chapter summaries just repeat, in a sentence form, the chapter's heading. The editing is horrible. The text is riddled with typos that will be confusing to the beginner. Example: Page 69 "test" should be "text" -- a significantly different semantic meaning for the sentence.

If you're a beginner, look for a different text. If you're an intermediate like me and need to brush up on what you already know, buy this book and see how many typos that YOU can find.

To people that are new to SQL, John Garmany proves that SQL does NOT stand for Scary Query Language. It is an excellent step-by-step primer to take the uninitiated from clueless to competent. What I think is most impressive, is Mr. Garmany's ability to quickly take the student from creating very simple queries to very complex queries without causing the user severe mental and emotional stress. In fact, the examples included in the book, while challenging, are interesting, and even fun. There are lots of SQL books on the market, but this one doesn't require you to be the office geek to get a LOT out of it. Get this book, work through the examples, and pretty soon you to can impress your co-workers, as well as your boss. Highly recommended!

As the editor for this book I appreciated the challenge of writing a book that takes a complicated subject and explains it in plain English.

Col. Garmany has done a good job with this task, and he strives to put himself into the mindset of the novice and explain Oracle SQL queries in easy-to-understand terms. The text has a sample database so that the reader can follow-along, and the queries start simple, with the more complicated SQL constructs such as sub queries being presented at the end of the text, after the basics are explained.

The real value of the book is the explanations of the SQL*Plus formatting commands for making reports with Oracle SQL. Garmany explains it is simple terms, and the reader seeds examples of the formatting commands and the corresponding output.