28 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
2 Authors -- one good, one really, really bad, September 19, 2001
This review is from: Sams Teach Yourself PL/SQL in 21 Days (2nd Edition) (Paperback)
After reading the first 3 chapters of this book, I was thinking to myself "Wow! This book is great". However, moving on to chapter 4, it felt like a bus fell on me. I read the next few chapters in stunned amazement, wondering what happened, and then I discovered it -- the first three chapters had been written by a different author than the current chapters that I was struggling through.
Where the first chapters, written by Jonathan Gennick, had pertinent, precise examples and a good development of the subject matter, the subsequent chapters (4-9), written by Tom Luers, contained error after error with poor development of the subject matter. The naming of variables was confused and the case of variables and keywords changed from example to example (and even within the same example!).
When I started reading this book, I typed all the examples into Personal Oracle to experiment along with the text. In addition, I placed small "sticky" notes on each page where I encountered an error in the text. I found only a few in the first few chapters. However, after hitting chapter 4, I found myself putting notes on at least every other page, and sometimes multiple notes on a single page! After struggling through several chapters of Luers' writing, I could no longer bring myself to type in the examples -- actually, some of the examples were based on tables that had not even been covered yet in the text, making it impossible to try them. Also, because of the huge number of errors, I stopped adding "sticky" notes, lest I run out of my supply.
Sadly, I cannot recommend this book (even though I found the chapters written by Gennick to be very good). If you do buy this book, read chapters 1-3, 10-13, 16-17, and 20-21, and skip the rest.
My final thoughts: I cannot believe that a publisher would sell a book with such an amazing number of errors, or that such a solid technical author would partner with such an incapable one.
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23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good for CompSci majors considering an OCP, October 19, 2000
This review is from: Sams Teach Yourself PL/SQL in 21 Days (2nd Edition) (Paperback)
I generally agree with the other reviewers on this book - despite some errors, it is a solid set of PL/SQL lessons. Great results can be produced by using the book as designed (download a copy of Personal Oracle, and spend three hours a day hacking the &@:=#! out of it). However, these favorable reviews can be misleading, as they lack a "Who is this book for?" section. Unlike many "Teach Yourself" titles, this is not good reading for the absolute novice. To get the most from this book, you should have:
1. Functional and theoretical knowledge of at least one high-level programming language.
2. A good understanding of database theory and terminology.
3. Some experience with SQL (and ideally with Oracle, but if you can make Access do tricks, you'll be fine).
4. Three weeks off. ;-)
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15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Gets the job done, March 13, 2000
This review is from: Sams Teach Yourself PL/SQL in 21 Days (2nd Edition) (Paperback)
This book is pretty good. Each of the 21 lessons takes a couple of hours to read, so the pace is about right. I learned a lot of PL/SQL from this book, so I'm glad I bought it.
The book is pooly edited, though, and is full of errors. A couple of times there were serious errors in the example programs, but they weren't enough to spoil the book.
If you have a little programming experience, you might try just using the PL/SQL chapters in the Oracle8: The Complete Reference. You're going to need a book like that anyway....
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