Customer Reviews

Oracle and Java Development

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

 

 

This book is not a reference manual for seasoned veterans and is not a tool that exposes new techniques and theories for intermediates. It is simply the best book I've come across to figure out how to get started using Java with and in Oracle.

If you don't know Java and you don't know Oracle, this book will only be helpful as a terse guide while you learn those technologies.

If you know Java OR Oracle, this book can be a very useful "what do I NEED to know" manual to get them working together ala "You stuck your chocolate in my peanut-butter."

Where I think this book will really shine is in that relatively new area of PL/SQL-Java developers. This book is great for small shops or shops with junior developers.

What I like is how it simply takes you step-by-step on how to do things (vs. 400 pages of theories and thoughts I find in many "technical" books).

What I don't like is that it is not a stand-alone book for real beginners. It won't teach you Java and it won't teach you PL/SQL. Though I realize those topics would be "beyond the scope...". I have recommended to my junior developers to pick up O'Reilly books for Java and PL/SQL and then use this book to piece them together. I haven't seen any Sams books on Java or PL/SQL that I really liked and that's a shame, because this book could be used to tie them together.

Another problem I have with the publisher (not the author) is the misformatting of code samples in Chapter 2. I spoke with the publisher and they promised to have those corrected in future printings, but it's annoying and could be confusing to juniors who try to type in the code and wonder why it won't compile (there are errors in formatting of both Java and PL/SQL code, again showing bilateral support).

If you need to get Java working on Oracle or just want to know how it's done, this is the book for you. If you want to actually learn Java and PL/SQL, check out the O'Reilly library.

The author deserves high marks for keeping the language concise and clear. The examples are very detailed and helpful.

found the plan of this book to be well structured and a much needed guide to getting many aspects of Oracle and Java related technologies to work together. If you're already familiar with Oracle, plsql and Java then this is the place for everything to do with fitting them together, using and implementing them. It covers the lot from server pages & servlets to jdbc and handling java in the database.
I'd have given this book 5 stars except I found reading the badly formatted code hugely irritating. Code in Chapter2 is unreadable but theres a general code formatting and indentation problem throughout which is annoying and time wasting (all carefully avoided in the amazon.com excerpt pages)
Page 181 for example has a structure like this:-
"try{if{}}catch{try{}catch{}}catch{}finally{try{}catch{}}}"
Try reading this stuff when it's not indented properly.
Pretty unscrupulous of Sams (publisher) not to have pulled this book.
I'd still recommend it because it is so well written but consider waiting for the nth edition.