Customer Reviews

Oracle8i Certified Professional SQL & PL/SQL Exam Guide

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

 

 

Book reviews should help people who have not purchased a book to make a buying decision. If you like frustration, like researching information in books and checking it for accuracy as if you were the author, go ahead, buy the book. But if you want a book that prepares you to take the OCP exams, buy something else.

This book is comprehensive and easy to understand, but contains many errors and contradictions. The Excercise questions are often vague or outright wrong. Furthermore the answer is just what letter is write with no explanation.

My advice go elsewhere. I hear SYBEX is good.

I was a DBA two years ago. I had about 3 years experience using Oracle. I found this book to be a good review, though I found myself finding various errors. Some errors were typo's, some were just my own disagreement with the author. I also felt like the author didn't have much experience as an Oracle DBA--this may be unjustified, but it was my feeling based on reading his examples and comments. Nonetheless, the sections of the book match up with the overview of knowledge required by the OCP test 1Z0-001 very well, and by design. I just read through the book and took one of the sample tests. Taking the real test, I scored 55/57 (39 is passing), so I think the book significantly helped me prepare.

Another problem with this book is that it is not followed up by others in this series. Now I am ready for the next test, but guess what, no book! That's right, I have the option of buying the book with all five tests, but not one book per test, like this one. I think I'm switching to the "Exam Cram" series due to that (even though I hate the title!)

I hope this helps,
Regards,
David

It is a decent book. I believe using this book alone you will not pass the test. Unless you have been working on oracle for a while. I used this book as supplement of the Sybex study guide. The practice exam questions were helpful. I passed my exam (1z0-001) on March 29, 2004 relying on the Sybex Study Guide. I would not recommend this book to someone new to oracle but I can recommend that as second reference.
I give 3 stars.

I used this book and the Exam Cram email alerts to study for the SQL PL/SQL exam. I ended up with a 50 out of 57 and would highly recommend this book. The main ingredient with the first exam is to practice everything, figure out why things work, why things don't work and figure out what is really going on behind the scenes. This book gives you enough information to pass the test.

Respecting Oracle Press I bought this book... :( NEVER AGAIN! Why don't they clearly write on the outside that this is a word-for-word copy of the DBA 8i Certification Guide? Makes you realize the pitfalls of online buying!!!

I do not know why but most (have not read all) of Couchman's books are filled with errors, have very poor indexes and in many areas the material covered is also very poor. The rest of this review was edited by Amazon!

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I found quite a few errors in this book, which was incredibly frustrating - especially considering I was learning new material. The answers for the practice tests have references to some index that's not in the book.

The book covers most of the material for the OCP SQL & PL/SQL exam. Actually, it covers part of OCP DBA what may be a waste of time if you're not taking the DBA portion of it. The CD brings simulated exams and I found the questions similar to the real exam (the CD itself is worth the money I paid on the book). The book and the CD have 100s of question/answer. The book needs improvements though, the answers to the tests references the subject by the topic, but the topics index make no reference to the page where the subject can be found, what makes hard to find the subject for reviews.

Poorly organized and filled with errors. Oracle Press has better titles, use one of their other books to prepare for the exam.