Customer Reviews

Oracle Database 10g PL/SQL Programming

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

SQL developers experienced with non-Oracle databases or Oracle developers who are looking for a good reference manual should definitely pick up a copy of this book. Inexperienced SQL developers will probably get more out of Oracle Press' other excellent book PL/SQL 101.

This book begins exactly the way experienced developers would expect-it starts out at a running pace. The book takes the next hundred-or-so pages just discussing PL/SQL basics. Where this book excels is in its examples. Each and every PL/SQL principle is clearly illustrated with many clear and relevant examples. The author then begins into a discussion of advanced PL/SQL techniques, which includes a discussion of cursors, built-in functions, and records.

The middle section of the book covers management and syntax of Oracle packages and functions. This excellent discussion covers such issues as package scope and permissions. This discussion naturally leads into advanced PL/SQL techniques including transactions, pipes, and various built-in DBMS packages. Finally, the book rounds out its PL/SQL discussions by reviewing use of Large Objects (LOB). In this section, the author discusses use and retrieval of data in this format.

I would highly recommend this book to experienced Oracle or even non-Oracle developers who want to sharpen their PL/SQL skills or who are looking for a really good PL/SQL reference. This is a must-have book for anyone serious about their PL/SQL development work.

The book is a large survey of the PL/SQL language and introduces many new things that have changed with 10g. But there is a major problem with the book, which runs throughout almost all Oracle Documentation.

The book is written more as a corporate training manual than that of a programming text book. As probably everyone who ever took a training class from their company knows, training is often done by people who not only are not educators, but may not actually understand or have even used the subject of the training. It is intentional that such people do not state the concepts abstractly - they only know concrete examples and maybe only the example in their pre-written material.

This book fits this description to a T. It does not specify the correct syntax except in examples. It does not specify the qualifications and conditions governing the language elements or the examples. As such, unless you are essentially copying an example almost verbatim, you have no real knowledge of whether your code will compile, let alone work as intended. As an example consider their discussion of SELECT statements. They speak about the Select clause, the INTO clause, etc. Nowhere do they state that the list of items in the INTO clause should separated by commas. Although most people could correctly guess that the comma is the separator, you need to find an example to show you that. The book is rampant with omissions like this. Two pages later, they use an OPEN - FOR construct in an example without introducing it. That it can be used dynamically, i.e. with the query in a character string constructed at run time, is not only not mentioned in this section, but is not even mentioned in the chapter on Dynamic SQL.

This should be looked upon as a book of (simple) examples. It should be no one's text or reference.

I bought this book hoping it would help me pass the 1Z0-147 Oracle PL/SQL certification test, and it did. First the bad news: chapters five and six are horrible. The person that wrote these two chapters writes in the most pedantic way possible. Pages upon pages are filled with highly repetitive code, with each example followed by a detailed analysis of every statement! Compare this to the coding examples in other chapters, where statements of interest are highlighted and then followed by descriptions of their significance. If you want a laugh, check out page 225, where the author of chapter six says, "A problem with programming books is that concepts need to be illustrated with an economy of space." Wow.

I read the first ten chapters of this book sequentially in order to prepare for the exam, and (with the obvious exception of chapters five and six) really enjoyed the material. I think the book is well written: the organization is excellent and the examples are very clear and concise. I especially liked the summaries comparing and contrasting one construct or approach to another. The book is addressed to individuals that have programming and SQL experience, but I think it could be used by a database beginner as well.

If you're studying for 1Z0-147, my advice is: read this book (chapters 1 - 10, 16) then read the Oracle Application Developer's Guide - Fundamentals, Part II: PL/SQL (Procedure & Packages, Dynamic SQL, and Triggers). Getting an online study guide helps as well as you can train for the exam is an environment virtually identical to the one in which the exam is given.

I got the book for some of the new 10g features and have found it helpful. The examples were very great once I found them. After some digging I found the code for the examples online, but according to amazon there was supposed to be a cd...WHERE??

I recommend the book, but know that you need to download the examples (nice format for the code btw).

I've only been completely through various sections that are relevant to projects that I am now working on. However, even though it isn't written for the novice, the general info has already proven to be an incredible refresher that takes the reader into great depth and with a wide variety of real world examples that make sense and work. No more old broken examples that never did work. Yipee!!!

Of particular interest to me is the information on working with different composite data types. Also, if you want solid and extensive info on handling exceptions with PL/SQL, I highly recommend the book. From a readability standpoint, it is by far the best Oracle book that I've come across, taking rather dry confusing information, organizing it, and laying it out in a logical and useable fashion.

Managers... know this book since it will be the title your new 10g PL/SQL hires will have been taught from. Particularly advantageous to those who teach will be NOT having to rewrite examples and the resulting loss of hair and sleep.

Kudos

This is book did help me learn PL/SQL; however, it did it in a very painful manner. The book could have easily been condensed to half the size and still convey the same information, only clearly and to the point. Many of the chapters have long coding examples that are followed by a line-by-obvious-line description about what is going on. It's tempting to skip the code explanations; however, there is the occasional hidden piece of useful information in them that forces you to sift through the junk. To make matters worse, much of the code is needlessly commented. You know what type of comments I'm talking about; there will be a comment that reads '-- declare a variable of type varchar' and then a declaration immediately afterward. Wow, thanks for doubling the code size and killing some more trees. Topping that off, in some of the examples, the comments don't actually match what the code is doing. Grrr.

I invested a lot of time in reading this book and after it was all said and done my feeling on it was, meh, I guess I learned something. The book is pretty good, it's just needlessly big, too big and time consuming for the value that it brings to your skill set.

I have attempted to learn pl/sql for a few years now and have been unable to find a book that pulls it all together. This book gently introduces you to a topic and then then shows you how to apply it. The comical nature of the author also makes the book interesting and fun. I believe its a must read for anyone attempting to learning pl/sql.

This just paraphrases the "PL/SQL User's Guide and Reference" freely available from Oracle. (Visit tahiti dot oracle dot com.) In contrast, the hardly-known Oracle PL/SQL by Example by Rosenzweig has better examples and friendlier discussion of more commonly used features of PL/SQL; it complements the Oracle documentation with well-chosen emphasis. I bought both books a year ago and seldom refer to this one any more because it has never yielded useful information. (Nor do I refer to Rosenzweig's book any more, but that's because it was so easy to learn that I remember it.)

This book covers advanced topics that Oracle PL/SQL by Example does not, such as external subprograms, dynamic SQL, and objects in the database, but since those topics are (of course) also covered in the free Oracle user's guide, I cannot recommend buying this. The PDF file from Oracle can at least be searched electronically. On the other hand, printing some Oracle PDFs and having them spiral-bound at Kinko's cost me over $20 each, so if you need a paper copy the purchase of this book becomes a bit more feasible.

I am using it in the context of a text book under one of the authors. My only complaint with the book is that some of the topics seems to be shallow in content (for example records in chapter 5). As a person just learning PL/SQL I rather like the fact that it covers many topics, and takes the time to show example after example with explanations. The organization seems to be fairly uniform. I would recommend this book to anyone wanting to learn PL/SQL as it has helped me immensely. I have found the index to be rather lacking (hence the four stars).

All-in-all this is a solid book. I use it for reference regularly, and have used a few of the examples in my development. I found that sections that overlapped with Oracle docs were more in-depth here (I finally understand lob storage). There were a few areas that I would have liked to see more coverage on, such as error handling.

I did find a few typos in the text, but they seemed to be addressed in the errata. (...)