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Rating: 
Summary: a good way to get started and beyond
Review: Humor (though a tad silly), short sections, tips, and real software (trial) combine to make the book easy to read and helpful for getting started. In fact, since the software includes a library of electronic books for learning more advanced Oracle, a person would never need to buy another book on the subject--a tremendous savings of money in both the short and long run. I recommend it: "Personal Oracle 7" looks good on my resume.
Rating: 
Summary: Buy the software from Oracle leave the book.
Review: I bought this book mostly for the CD ROM which was supposed to contain a version of Oracle 7 that would run on a Mac. Big mistake, it would not run properly and kept crashing. On top of that it does not appear the author even tried the software as the text describes a Navigator application that does not exist on the Mac version. The error message stated that there was insufficient memory to run the application, yet I have 128MB of RAM installed. So I loaded up the software using the Windows version. The software worked just fine. Only in some cases the instructions were totally wrong, as in the case of making columns NULL or NOT NULL. The process is irreversible so you have to drop the existing tables and recreate new ones. As others have reported the book is poorly organized and I found myself jumping back and forth just trying to create a USER and setting up priveleges. You'd be better off ordering the trial software from Oracle, there's only a minimal charge for it.
Rating: 
Summary: Newly Ex-College student
Review: I don't know why everyone is slamming this book. I thought it was quite good actually. For one thing it gives the user Personal Oracle 7 which in and of itself is worth the price of the book. Because of this book I am able to use Oracle on my NT 4.0 workstation machine at home and have learned tons that I did not know before. The book is very basic and should be used as a stepping block to other Oracle books. For the programmer who needs a quick overview and a few tools to help him around Oracle hookem over to the bookstore to get this one. It is a keeper.
Rating:
Summary: Newly Ex-College student
Review: I never read the book, I bought the software for the Relational Database class I took in college, so that I could write the programs/homework on my home PC instead of the college computer lab.
Rating: 
Summary: Marginally useful
Review: This book won't do you much good unless you are completely ignorant about relational databases. I had only a small clue when I started reading -- I had a pretty good grasp of the general way databases work, but I wanted to learn more about the specific features of Oracle 7 which make it superior. No such luck!Although there's good coverage of very general things common to all RDBMS products, each time you come close to learning what makes Oracle neat you get fed the "This is beyond the scope of the book" line. Likewise for any useful SQL stuff, since the SQL examples are very task-oriented. There's a fair amount of "To do this, run this pre-packaged script," but very little to show you the overall picture and help you come up with your own nifty tricks. There is some good information here, but too often it's obscured by bad editing or an attempt to be cute in coming up with examples. Admittedly, this is the first _... for Dummies_ book that I read, so perhaps my expectations were unrealistic. The only thing I have to compare it with is _SQL for Dummies_, which I thought was more helpful by far.
Rating:
Summary: A Poorly Written and Unedited WASTE of Money!
Review: This is not a Dummies book for Beginners which is a shame because that's the whole reason for the series. This book has the feel of a rough draft. The chapters don't flow in a logical order and you have to spend way too much time in the first few chapters flipping to chapters near the end to accomplish anything. Most of the step-by-step instructions are wrong and missing critical information. The humor, which is the hallmark of the series, is contrived and pathetic. In my opinion, this book was written by the author for a quick buck and accepted by IDG to plug a gap in their market. The only reason I gave this book 2 stars is because it does come with an excellent companion CD. I would have returned this book for a refund if my job and my company weren't so dependent on my immediately learning Oracle survival skills.
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