Pro .NET Oracle Programming

Rating:
Summary: Useful for me
Review: As someone who has written some .NET applications using MS Access and SQL Server I found the material to be appropriate and helpful as I am new to Oracle. Some things that I found especially helpful were:

- discussing the difference between an Oracle database and an instance

- what the various parameter files such as the tnsnames.ora and sqlnet.ora files are for and how to configure them

- the examples of how to use bind variables, pl/sql, and the advanced connections chapter

I do agree with the first reviewer that this book does somewhat sew together material from other sources (which I actually found helpful not a negative), but I disagree that the examples were not helpful or extensive enough - there were appropriate examples for each topic so far as I could tell.

All and all I would say this is a worthwhile book if you are new to Oracle and need to figure out how to get started developing applications for Oracle.

Rating:
Summary: How could it have been better for you?
Review: Dr. Oracle,

I am, of course, disappointed that you did not find the book helpful. I am, however, curious as to how it could have been better? For example, when you say, "I found that the authors examples and stratigies are not those that actually happen in real world environments." What specifically about them do feel is not "real-world"? You also say, "If would had been helpful if he could have provided some of his own experiences he deals with on a day to day basis." A great many of the topics (such as lack of bind variable usage and array usage) come directly from daily experience - perhaps I did not specifically state that in more than a few places. The book is targetted to a developer with some database experience but is new to Oracle. In short, I tried to show how to create "correct" Oracle applications from .NET for that audience.

Thanks,
Mark

Mark A. Williams, Author Pro .NET Oracle Programming

Rating:
Summary: Good, but still basic
Review: From the title you would expect this to drill into some deep Oracle technical issues. It doesn't do that. It's a fairly screenshot intensive walkthrough of basic Oracle use in .NET. It starts with connectivity, information retrieval and manipulation. Then exception handling, stored procedures and large object operations. There is some coverage of performance issues.

There is a lot of good content here. It's well written and organized. The screenshots aren't overwhelming and the sample code is good. A good book on Oracle use in .NET, even if it is a little mis-titled.

Rating:
Summary: Not quite as useful as I thought
Review: I found that the authors examples and stratigies are not those that actually happen in real world environments. If would had been helpful if he could have provided some of his own experiences he deals with on a day to day basis. This book seems to be a cross-refrenece to sew together other books (Oracle and .Net) instead of a best practices and examples.
Not very useful of those in an enterprise environment.

Rating:
Summary: Confirmed my real-world experience
Review: I put a system into production last fall with .NET and Oracle. Wish I had this book nine months ago! Mark has good advice for someone new to Oracle, but familiar with .NET. I've gone back and tweaked the system based on Mark's recommendations. I'm happy.

Rating:
Summary: Cleared my doubt
Review: I was having some doubts about connecting to database in ASP page and this book helped cleared my doubts. If u want a book with samples that shows how to do common tasks u can find them in this book. If ur using vb then u need to download the samples cos the samples in the book are using c#.

Bye!

Rating:
Summary: ADO.NET into for oracle 10g
Review: I would like to have given this book a 5 stars
but the title is greatly over-exagerated for Pros

This is the first time I have accessed oracle for the first
time thru visual studio and the book has helped me overcome
that fear. The examples are clear and concise in its into
to oracle so even an idiot could pick it up.

I would like to see a book which extends more on real life examples. A drawback i would like to add about this book.
This book is TOO exepensive for a introductory book

I am thrilled that all the examples do work which was a MAJOR plus.

Rating:
Summary: fills a gap in documentation
Review: Is it just me, that does not immediately see an overlap between Oracle and .NET? Historically, Oracle databases have tended to be installed on unix workstations (especially Solaris). And nowadays, on linux as well. But Williams points out that given the widespread presence of .NET, and that Oracle is the dominant database, then we should indeed have an important market intersection of the two.

Other books have described using C#/.NET with Microsoft's SQL Server. Not surprising, because Microsoft supplies all these parts. But this book is perhaps overdue, in filling a gap in the documentation of .NET and Oracle.

The exposition herre is logical, and not unlike some of those other books. (Cf. "SQL Server Query Performance Tuning Distilled" by Dam.) Except of course that you are shown how to optimise table design and complex queries for Oracle. Plus, Williams describes this for Oracle 10g Enterprise Edition - Oracle's latest flagship version.

The book uses C# as the programming language, since it seems to be the best supported "native" language of .NET.

In the development environment, he gives some simple GUIs to access the database. Done often in VB.NET or Microsoft Window Forms. Realistically, any GUIs for your work will be more intricate. But you get enough GUI framework code to get you started along these lines.