Customer Reviews

Oracle8i for Linux Starter Kit (Book/CD-ROM Package)

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

I have wanted to get my own copy of Oracle for some time. I looked at the Oracle web site back in May 2000 and noticed that Oracle for Linux was available at a price of several hundred dollars. As much as I wanted a copy, I thought the price was a little steep, so I gave the idea away.

I was therefore, very pleasantly surprised when I came across this book at a far lower price, offering essentially the same deal.

The book consists of 12 Chapters grouped into 3 Sections. These are Getting Started, Fundamentals of Application Development, and Basic Database Administration.

Part 1 covers the installation and configuration of Oracle. If you follow the instructions carefully you shouldn't have any problems installing Oracle. In particular, if you read the System Requirements Section in Chapter 2 you will quickly find out if your system is able to handle the job of running Oracle. In my case I found that I needed a memory upgrade, which I duly carried out before installation. The installation instructions are very detailed and well laid out.

Part 2 of the book deals with Introductory SQL, PL/SQL, Using Java and extending Oracl;e Objects. Part 3 deals with Securing Database Access, Managing Database Space, Database Protection and Basic Tuning.

Each chapter,(except for Chapter 1) consists of 1 to 3 paragraphs of text, possibly with a screen shot or diagram, followed by an exercise based on the previous text. This is followed by some more text followed by an exercise , and so on. Some Chapters have close to 30 exercises. In a lot of cases you cannot really move onto the later exercises till you've done the earlier ones. Even the Installation of Oracle is presented as an exercise.

The typeface used in the book is quite large, and there are nearly 200 Exercises altogether. As a result the explanatory material is quite terse. A little too terse for my liking.

Leaving aside the fact that the book is a bargain for the CD alone, it's best described as an Assignment Book for people learning the Basics of Oracle.Using the book by itself, is the Oracle equivalent of trying to teach yourself C programming by using Kernighan and Ritchie by itself. (Yes I know it can probably be done ... but would would you want to do it that way?)

If you were attending a formal course of lectures in introductory Oracle, this book would be perfect for a bunch of assignments to go with the course. Basically, what the book needs is far more explanation. The explanations given in the book are OK, but they are a little too brief.

I am now looking at buying one or more other books on Oracle to give me a little more background so I don't just know the "how" of Oracle but the "why" as well. (One book I looked at was Oracle Development Unleashed ... that seems to be on the other side of the spectrum ...all chat with very little practical material ... but I digress... ) I am not going to throw this book away, but I badly need some other material to supplement it.

There are a couple of minor errors in the chapters 3 and 4 as well. For example, the location of the initialization file on page 43. It says ... /usr/oraInventory......./initoralin. Thats not where mine was installed. Also there is a minor typo on page 80 where it explains how to use @ command. Also I think there's a bug in the oraenv script in the downloadable zip file. There may well be other errors further on. At the moment I'm reading other Oracle books to try and find out what schemas and instances and user rights etc etc are. I plan to work my way through the remaining chapters when I have a little more background knowledge.

One nice touch is the inclusion of a script so that you can get Oracle to start up with the other system programs when you boot up and shut down nicely when you shutdown.

Notwithstanding its shortcomings I think the book is well worth purchasing. The CD is worth getting and the Exercises, although they are badly in need of some supplementary explanation, have at least given me a list of activities to do with Oracle.

OK so, how do I rate this book ? I am rating it in three parts, each worth a maximum of 5. I give it 5 out of 5 for value for money (mainly because of the CD), I give it 5 out of 5 for the exercises, and I give it 2 out of 5 for its explanation of what is actually happening with all the commands and assignments. I'm not criticizing the quality of the explanations, just the quantity.

OK that's 5 plus 5 plus 2 which is 12. Divide by 3 gives an overall rating of 4.

I already own the same book for Oracle8i on Windows NT & was again impressed with the ease of installation & learning. The book is very thorough & shows examples as well as sample problems for most situations. If you learn best by doing, this book is for you. (I would have given 5 stars, but a week after the book's release, the download material is still not available. I used the NT download for the chapter SQL scripts but the \SCRIPTS directory is not available. While it is good that I had to think to make some of the missing material work, it would make it easier to have the download available, especially since I'm not yet a Linux expert.)

This book is great. After trying in vain to install a download of Oracle 8.1.5 standard edition for linux I bought this book for a help reference. It comes with Oracle 8.1.6 enterprise. I got it installed and configured on Linux Mandrake 7 in about 3 hours. The Oracle instructions were great, but the linux/unix parts provide little explanation. Some knowledge of Linux is expected but I am by no means an expert. I got by with a combination of the Linux Mandrake docs and the Redhat 6.2 administrators study guide.

This book is perfect for a reasonably resourceful and talented beginner with Oracle. It provides a much better practical hands on approach than the various OReilly books, which however are also good.

I have installed it on RedHat 6.2, and also on RedHat 7.1, after following the instructions that come with that distribution regarding compatibility issues with the Java Virtual Machine, which is what Oracle Installer uses. I think it is completely unfair of reviewers here to pile on with 1 star reviews because Oracle and RedHat didn't coordinate sufficiently to make sure Oracle would install cleanly on RedHat versions subsequent to 6.2. How on earth is that the author's fault?

This is not a book for Linux newbies, nor should it be (I've been using Linux for virtual web accounts, and at home, on and off, for 3 years). It is also not a book for intermediate/advanced Oracle users, nor should it be: that's why it's an Oracle "Starter Kit".

I'd have given this book five stars except that the book does not advocate the implementation of "OFA" or "Optimal Flexible Architecture", as far as partioning and/or organizing Oracle files on Linux. Partitioning in particular is more of a Linux issue, but this is one place where I think the author should have gotten more deeply into such concerns.

I'm tempted to give this book 5 stars to offset the one star reviews, but that would be dishonest, and I am not going to stoop to the level of most of those reviewers who in my opinion have completely unreasonable expectations of the author.

NOTE: RED HAT USERS SHOULD READ THIS BEFORE BUYING

Overall I really liked this book. I have a lot of industry experience but not much experience with Oracle and this book was a perfect introduction. The material was extremely well organized and presented in an easy to read format.

The strength of this book is that it will give you enough information to get up and running without bogging you down with too much details that you won't initially need. The chapter on PL/SQL is very helpful for a person with SQL knowledge. Once you work through the compatibility issues (see below) you should have the database installed in no time at all.

Now the reason this book lost a star. After buying the book I realized that the Oracle installer (Oracle Bug) will not run on Red Hat 7.0. It should run fine on version 6.2 so you may not want to upgrade. If you want to upgrade make sure you move directly to Red Hat 7.1 which was released with new compatibility libraries which are backwards compatible. I did not use the version of Oracle which came with the book but instead downloaded 8.1.7 from Oracle's web site and successfully installed it on Red Hat 7.1.

To find the neccessary information to install under version 7.1, go to Red Hat's site and search for "7.1 last minute oracle".

Had to figure out by myself why CD wasn't installing on my RedHat 7.0. (get patch from otn.oracle.com!) Wasted a lot of time when osborne could have just simply put a tip on their website. Tsk tsk...

I gave up on Red Hat and went with SuSE LINUX to get the install done. The install was smooth, but SuSE has preexisting oracle user, oinstall group, and dba group, so I had to fiddle with it a little. (Hey, it worked for me.) I've got the instructions if anybody knows where I can post them. Until then just email me at mattdegurse@hotmail.com and I'll get them out to you ASAP.

This book is certainly basic but is an easy to read, and more importantly understand, work on getting a simple 8i instance and database running on Linux. Now I can start pursuing a DBA OCP at home!

Who ever tried to install Oracle 8i on Linux knows that this task is like black magic vodoo, not to be attempted by mere mortals. With the help of Steve Bobrowskis book I killed the beast, and in the end all seems easy and very quickly done. The book is clearly written and gives a good base for further work (optimizing Linux kernels and Red Hat systems, program/data partition splittings etc.). There are interesting examples, good exercises and many figures which help to follow the strong logic of the material.

Moreover, the book comes together with an Oracle 8i CD with the latest release (8.1.6.0.0 the best one Oracle has ever made). In short: a really great book and a must for everyone who want to dive into Oracle 8i installation/administration ocean!

I've been sitting here for 2 days trying to get the Oracle that was shipped with the book to install. I've read and re-read the instructions and various README files, but nothing works. I am running RedHat 7.0 Linux kernel 2.2.16 and I run Oracle on Solaris at work, so I pretty much know what I'm doing. The Oracle Universal Installer hangs at Database Creation Progress, at 92%, the logs show nothing. Once in a while, I get an ORA-03113, but usually it just hangs. So I thought I would send an email to the Steve Bobrowski, but alas, his email address is nowhere to be found, or maybe I'm just missing it somewhere.

This book looked good in the bookstore, but a simple problem like failing to load the provided software will force me to return it. I can not suggest buying this book.

This beautiful book has Oracle8i enterprise version software. Even if you are a novice in Linux you can still install Oracle on top of that with the help of this book with a little attention to detail. I used RedHat 6.2 after I ran into problems with Redhat 7.0. The problem seems to be with Redhat as it was suggesting most of the time to report a bug. I then put in 6.2 and paid more attention to the text in italics in Steve's book ( be careful there). The installation was a breeze and I have now what I had wanted for a long while. Infact I have DB2UDB also (7.1) running in the same machine. I have 256 MB memory. My suggestion is to have another Linux reference as a stand by esp. if you are not very conversant with Linux. RedHat Linux System administrator's Black Book is a good one for suggestion. In my opinion this book is definitely worth buying if you are serious about exploring the possiblilities of Oracle on Linux. Oracle DBAs with Unix background are in good demand and I feel this is the right place to start towards that DBAdom.;-)