Rating: 
Summary: Outstanding Text. I use it almost every day!
Review: After searching and searching for an easy-to-understand yet comprehensive book about Oracle and the Oracle development environment (especially PL/SQL and the suite of Developer 2000 tools); I feel quite fortunate to have finally found a solid and affordable book that bridges the gap between learning and practical use. After using the book to complete two semester long courses: one in PL/SQL and another course in Developer 2000; I find myself turning to the text time and time again on an almost daily basis for reference as I work as as a project manager and a developer for an international consulting company. In fact, the material that I learned from the book helped me land a terrific position in e-commerce project management and development. This book has proven itself to be an obvious addition to my personal library. When so many other books containing the same information cost two or three times as much; it is a must buy. I only wish I had gotten so much from just one or two of the other books in my library.
Rating: 
Summary: Keep Looking!
Review: Horrible reference book. The source code has bugs. The discussion of normalization is both inaccurate and incomplete. Several typos in the text. It's also very dated as of this writing (9i just came out - this text only touches on version 8, so it's two versions behind now). You're better off to spend your money on "Oracle 8i - The Complete Reference", as it's a much better reference.
Rating:
Summary: Keep Looking!
Review: Horrible reference. The source code supplied with the book is full of bugs. The text contains numerous copy errors. The discussion on normalization is both erroneous and incomplete. Save your money!!!
Rating:
Summary: great book
Review: I'm a master degree student in universiy of phoenix, I bought this book as a referance to oracle database design, it is simply the best.
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Summary: Deceiving Cover, Outdated Content
Review: Publisher Que's book cover claims, "Includes Oracle8 Coverage", which is deceiving. There are only four pages on Oracle 8i. This book is written for the outdated Forms Designer 4.5. What a disappointment! The newer Oracle Forms Builder 6 is considerably different. Furthermore, the forms used in the exercises often will not compile, (because the author made the unfortunate choice of the PL/SQL-Forms reserved word "TOOLS" for one of the table names). You can drop the TOOLS table and create it with another name to make the examples work.
Some example forms need additional debugging. Taking empch14x.fmb as an example, this is what you need to do:
1. Set mapping of other values to "M" for the Gender item in data block one.
2. Change the post query trigger to point to the correct file location for the images. For example: filename := 'c:\palinski\ch14\'||to_char(:one.payroll_number)||'emp.tif';
3. Also in the post query trigger, you may need to change the "filename varchar2(25);" to something longer such as filename varchar2(30); to handle a longer path name.
4. Open the property palette for block two and change the Query Data Source Name and DML Data Target Name to the name of the re-named tools table. For example, if you renamed the TOOLS table to P_TOOLS, then enter the name P_TOOLS here.
Once these changes are made, the form works well and displays a TIF image associated with each record.
5. Open the property palette for the relation between block one and block two. Change the name of the TOOLS table to the name of the re-named tools table.
Another example is form DirCh16.fmb. This is a "directory" form, useful for finding records in large tables. To make this form work, open the property palette for block one and set Database Data Block = "No". This example form should have used parameters in the call to the next form, but instead the author used an unusual home-baked solution to pass a parameter to the called form.
The text omits instructions on how to pass parameters to a form using a parameter list, and instead describes a makeshift way of adding a non-database block to a form to pass a variable. Students would be better off to use a parameter list as Oracle intended.
Chapter 17 on reports briefly covers outdated Reports 2.5, which helps little towards learning Oracle 8i's Reports 6. Chapter 18 explains how to customize and create reports manually. This is something that is valuable, since the report wizards in Reports 6 are not flexible enough to cover all your needs. It should go further than is does. Few texts explain the full features of customizing reports with the manual tools of Oracle reports. A good follow-up text is Edelstein's "Report Builder 3.0".
A final red flag is on the author's acknowledgement page, (just prior to page 1), where he gives credit to his son for helping set up his new PC and for helping him learn Windows 95 and to Rush Limbaugh for inspiration. If you choose this book, you will not be learning standard techniques for making the most of Oracle. The book needs a good proofreading to eliminate all the typos and it needs updating to Oracle 8 or better. It is helpful as a review, once you have gone through some other text. Because of its shortcomings, a better beginner's choice is Prentice Hall's Oracle Forms Interactive Workbook by Motivala. That book builds concepts in a more logical step-by-step process and it describes how to send parameters to a called form with a parameter list. One drawback of this latter text is that the format of splitting the chapters between text, exercises, and answers can be confusing at times.
Rating: 
Summary: A book written for the Oracle database developer
Review: The purpose of this book is to be an information source that is both a how-to book and a reference manual. Many of the Oracle books on the market do not have all of the materials needed by the developer. This book is intended to teach the reader how to develop an Oracle database, and to be used by the developer when they become proficient. This book was written by a database developer for the database developer. In fact, I have this book on my desk and use it as a reference on a regular basis.
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Summary: Excellent book for beginner
Review: The writer was a professor who taught Oracle in college. He prepared the book for the oracle beginner. Clear, concise, easy to understand, it is really an excellent book. After I looked through it in two weeks, I got confidence and keep going on to learn stuff of middle level without hassle. I rate it five star.
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Summary: No Proofreading - Poor Quality Writing
Review: There are so many mistakes that the examples are endless...but for one, pp 222-223 are terrible. Two sentences are repeated multiple times in different paragraphs. Also on p. 46, the Locical Operators table, the "greater than" symbol is listed as a DOT rather than a ">". These are just two of many errors that should have been caught by basic editing/proofreading. It may answer your questions, but be careful...
Rating:
Summary: No Proofreading - Poor Quality Writing
Review: There are so many mistakes that the examples are endless...but for one, pp 222-223 are terrible. Two sentences are repeated multiple times in different paragraphs. Also on p. 46, the Locical Operators table, the "greater than" symbol is listed as a DOT rather than a ">". These are just two of many errors that should have been caught by basic editing/proofreading. It may answer your questions, but be careful...
Rating:
Summary: Not for the beginner
Review: This book was is written more as reference for someone with some introduction or reference point on this subject. Although it is marketed as a beginner book, it by no means is. The language is ambiguous and the examples skip around and are not fully explained. This was my text for an introductory Oracle class and it managed to confuse the student instead of support him/her.
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