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Oracle PL/SQL by Example (3rd Edition) Review by John
Well done. Oracle Education look out!
I'm a developer and DBA who had not written PL/SQL in over a year. I used this book as a refresher.
This is the "Learning Perl" of PL/SQL, meaning: a beginner can learn from it, and an experienced hack can use it as a reference.
I consider lots of good sample code to be important when learning a programming language. Here it is, as a series of labs, with intelligent discussion. It's like having a friend who's an expert act as a personal tutor. It has complete, well-rounded coverage of PL/SQL fundamentals: control structures, stored procedures, packages, and a good chapter on triggers. In rare cases where some keyword is introduced with no explanation, it's usually covered in the following section.
It is nearly the quality of Oracle course materials, but with (a tolerable amount of) typos. Annoyingly, some of the typos are incorrect answers in the appendix; the rest are obvious typos and therefore not too confusing.
Chapter 1 is deceptively basic, explaining what a program is, what a programming language is, etc., but chapter 2 jumps right into PL/SQL with no further ado. The book progresses in baby steps as far as PL/SQL is concerned. Although knowledge of SQL is assumed, some concepts like commit & rollback, savepoints, and sequences are introduced and explained for beginners. It is also assumed that the reader:
- knows what DML, DDL, and the DUAL table are;
- has an account that can create objects (the "Scott" demo account will do); and
- knows how to connect to the database with SQL*Plus or a development tool (IDE).
With an IDE I was able to work through it in about thirty hours. I just read chapters I was already strong in without working those labs, but that time included plenty of puttering and experimenting with the lab material I did work.
I also bought 10g "PL/SQL Programming" by Urman, et. al. but dove into this book first. The two books overlap. The freely available "PL/SQL User's Guide and Reference" from Oracle is still a must-have.
Densely packed with pertinent information and very little else, it's about 99% useful information. Like the blurb says, "Just the facts." It is a complete Oracle course, so it was worth $2400 in that respect.