Customer Reviews

Oracle Certified Professional Dba Certification Exam Guide

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(17)
3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(14)
1 star:		(26)

 

 

If a study guide is to be effective, it should combine written material and hands-on exercises - unfortunately, the author of this book chose to use examples which are not easily replicated on the database server. That is, where he could have used tables and examples from the default schema / databases usually included in an Oracle installation, he chose to use his own structures. An annoyance, when you're trying to grasp the concepts and you have to stop to create objects just to test the code. Relatively light treatment of the exam subjects and not a book you'd want to keep as a reference post-certification. Use the excellent Oracle8:The Complete Reference or the Exam Cram series instead of this....

I read many reviews warning not to buy this book, but I needed something and wanted to give it a chance. DON'T make the same mistake I made. I've read most of the first section laboriously, constantly re-reading paragraphs trying to understand what was written. I finally gave up and turned to another book, by Steve Fernstein (I think) on New Features of Oracle 8i by Published by O'Reilly. WHAT A DIFFERENCE to read something well written and well edited!

I don't know why this book is receiving such poor reviews. It's not as bad as people are saying. I passed all four exams over a period of four months using this book. If you read this book *thoroughly* and memorize the key points, that's all you really need to pass the tests. But, I'll admit, I put in a lot of effort to learn and memorize the material. Now that I've taken the tests, I actually have retained quite a bit of information from this book and use it as a reference on occasion. So maybe this isn't the best book in the world, but it does what it's supposed to do - help you pass the tests. Perhaps some people are expecting an "easy" way to pass the tests. It simply does not exist.

There are many, many, and many mistakes in this book. It's no help for passing OCP test, but misguiding you. This book wasted me a lot of money. It's a doubt why Oracle Press published such a junk book.

Oracle Certified Professional Dba Certification Exam Guide is still the best one-stop resource for preparing for the OCP exams in Database Administration. While I agree that no one should rely on this book 100%, it covers about 80% of the material tested on the actual exams. There are also some errors which I believe are a result of poor editing. These shouldn't take away significantly from the book. I have continued to use the book to teach students preparing for the OCP exams in Database Administration. In addition to hands-on experience, those preparing to take the Oracle7 OCP DBA exams may combine this book with Michael Ault's exam cram books covering tests 1 to 4 and the preparatory tests from Self Test Software (Stsware). Jason has done a great job in bringing together several Oracle manuals in one book.

I thought if a book is published by oracle press should be better than average. After reading few pages, I realized that I made a big mistake buying this book. The book is full of mistakes and does not cover all the material required for exams.

Due to a lack of alternatives, you'll probably need this book. However, the errors are rampant, and the editing is uneven. Just be careful not to take everything as gospel. I also found the sample questions in the book not very representative of the actual questions. Get the sample from the Oracle website

In my experience with this book, I should say it's a good one for those Oracle professionals who want to be certified. Must say there are many typo even wrong statements in this book, and even some parts are confusive. But in my experience, i bought this book from Amazon.com, and basicly all relied on this book for the preparation to get certified on version 7.3 and 8.0. My only suggestion to those who want to be certified is that you have to also check out some other OCP books like the ones by Michael Ault ( OCP exam cram, ie). In that way, you could have a broader view about the test content, but all in all, Jason's this book covers most of the exam content in detail and also the content in this book is in parallel with the ones in the exam list.

If there's rank of 3.5 stars, i would like use that for this book!

Good Luck!

This book is an excellent guide for the OCP Oracle7 DBA Exam with Oracle8 upgrade, and I highly recommend it. As far as I know, no better book for the OCP exam exists. I honestly don't understand why some people are so unfair in their reviews of this magnificent book.

The book is very well organized. Each section is dedicated to one of the required exams. The material is crisp clear and the coverage is to the point, custom made for OCP exam. I could not find another ONE book that covers as much material on Oracle. The errors and typos are minimal and DON'T present much problem.

Each chapter has a summary and a Two-Minute Drill as well as a set of challenging questions with complete and detailed answers. The Chapter Summary and the Two-minute Drill make a wonderful reading material the day before the exam.

The book comes with a CD-ROM containing an electronic version of the book and a test software that resembles the real exam with a set of sample questions.

The book will need updating for the OCP for Oracle8 DBA which is now offered by Oracle (or soon to be offered). Networking needs to be completely revised for Oracle8. Command line managers such as Namesctl80, Lisnrctl80, SVRMGR30, and National Language Support need more coverage.

The chapter on Tuning Memory Utilization needs slight modifications. The author uses the term "hit ratio" when he means "miss ratio". In many cases, the meaning is clear to the attentive reader and the negative logic is carried uniformly for the majority of cases, even in the chapter questions. I believe this is probably what confused a small number of readers. There is one case in particular where even the author confuses the semantics of the ratios (in the lower half of page 875 and the top of page 876) and unfortunately, to make this particular ONE example hard to figure, the given SQL-Plus select statement to compute the "MISS RATIO" does not work. One or two non-working code fragments in 1256 page book is insignificant by any standard.

To sum up. I highly recommend this book for those who need to prepare for the OCP exam.

Shakib Misherghi, Ph.D. Shakibm@yahoo.com(NOSPAM)

networking part covers may be 50% of what has to be covered and is not enough to pass the test. other parts are better, but also not complete. by my opinion, this book can be used as a guideline only.