Customer Reviews

Oracle in a Nutshell

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I agree with another reviewer who said if you know Oracle this could be the book for you. I'm tired of digging through huge books to answer a simple syntax question. This book enables me to get concise answers quickly. But, if you're an Oracle neophyte this is NOT the book for you.

This book is a terrific reference. I love having one place to look for all of those "simple" questions that come up -- the syntax for a particular function, how to format a column heading in SQL*Plus, what does a particular function from a package do. It comes in very handy when reading someone else's code. This book does not bog you down with lengthy explanations. It is not intended to replace training. It just pulls everything together in one place. If you're going to buy one Oracle book, this is it.

This is a huge book, and it's tough to consider it a "nutshell" (I'd hate to see the squirrel)---but it is far and away the most accurate and complete of all the Oracle mega-references out there. If you've tried to muddle through Oracle documentation, this is really a breath of fresh air.

This well-written multi-purpose 'Oracle' text has managed to track changes, and keep pace with all the recent developments in the software arena. Its presentation is more practical than theoretical. The book is versatile.
"Oracle in a Nutshell" includes all the 'includables'. Its layout is fine. However, if you are a beginner with only a vague knowledge of RDBMS (and stuffs like that), you are likely to be frustrated by this book's high assumptions. It does not have that type of patience (or gentility) that most "for dummies" series are famous for. The authors of this book designed it for the intermediate (and advanced) learners.

As an Oracle developer, I have been frustrated reading all the Oracle documentations. It's hard to locate what you want to know in those big and thick documentations. I was thrilled to find this book -- it really is a great reference and it can basiclly replace my collection of some other Oracle books. This book is very well-organized into different topics including architecture, data dictionary, SQL, PL/SQL, JAVA and much more. Some topics like PL/SQL and Java, (imagine they are in one book!) look more like a dictionary. You can easily look up for the systax/commands. It gives you a few lines coding as example followed by a brief explaination --All in a concise manor. ( I believe the author has spent considerable time and effort not only in writing the book to make it as complete as possible but also in oragzating each topic in a logical and easy to follow way. ).

Bottom line, this is a very comprehensive resource covering lots of topics, pretty much whatever you need is all in there, in one book!! I have been benefit a lot from having this book at my desktop for quick and easy reference.

In a word - indispensible! As usual, O'Reilly come through with the goods again, this time on a topic that most people would believe impossible to condense usefully into a single volume.

What's more, it is actually possible to simply read many of the lucid descriptive sections - for example the section describing the locking scheme is a model that all database documentation writers should take note of.

Of course, this book isn't for everyone; it presumes a decent grounding in the essentials of RDBMSs - but if you haven't got that, there are any number of books out there to get you started - and THEN you'll want this book.

When I purchased Oracle in a Nutshell I thought I would need to buy another book for a quick reference to the data dictionary views but to my pleasant surprise these were included too.

A great book but it's not for the weekend-warrior DBA. If you can create indexes, tables, tablespaces, users, instances and databases off the top of your head then you'll love this book. It saves having to wade through all the Oracle documentation to look for less frequently used syntax etc.

Ben

You might think that 900+ pages is a big nutshell, but they couldn't have done Oracle justice in fewer. This book ought to be one of the first, maybe THE first, on every DBA or developer's bookshelf. Fantastic!

Finally, a single place to go for questions like: "What goes in that tnsnames.ora file?", "What does the init.ora parameter BUFFER_POOL_RECYCLE do?", and "What's the format for creating a PL/SQL function?". An excellent quick reference (If you can call a book with 912 pages "quick".)

I am an experienced developer who purchased this book as a quick reference because I don't always have time to hack through the Oracle documentation. The book has been quite useful and I've found it has everything I need, but it is often difficult to find things because of the way the book is organized.

Specifically, what I find annoying is the lack of complete information all in one section. For example, the entry for TO_CHAR() for dates lists the syntax along with the input and optional mask parameter. The optional mask parameter is labeled dfmt which refers to a list of possible values in Appendix D. No where under the TO_CHAR() entry does it mention that the list of valid date formats is in Appendix D. If you have not used the book in a while, you will forget that the list is in Appendix D and spend the next ten minutes trying to figure out where the list is. FYI, I had to go all the way back to the first page of the chapter to find it. Could the author/editor not have included a small blurb next to the parameter like: (Appendix D)?
Also the SQL*Loader section is a little hard to figure out for those of us who only use that tool every six months or so. It seems I do a lot of cross referencing when I use this book.

All in all this book is accurate, complete, and quite handy. I am not certain how much improvement could be made in terms of expanding the details of each entry with out making the book much bigger, but I hope that some how the author will figure out a way. I look forward to seeing the 2nd edition.