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Rating: 
Summary: Good book, but fails to give a broad coverage
Review: I am an Oracle8 OCP DBA with an average score of 97% and over 8 years of IT experience. This book tries to cover a very extensive subject and fails to accomplish its task. There are many topics from the original Oracle OCP classes missing, and some others misplaced. Also, the chapters do not match those of the course book nor the exam sections. However, the practice questions are very close to the real ones, and that is the main reason I would buy this book. On the whole, it is a good piece of work - far better than the previous Oracle7 Exam Cram books - but do not expect to get a broad understanding of Oracle administration. Please read my other reviews to have my opinion on other preparation materials.
Rating: 
Summary: This is a great book!
Review: If you are new to Oracle, do not mistake the Exam Cram books as the "one stop shop" for all your preparation needs. They are great books to summarize in a very concise and thorough manner 90% of what's needed to pass the exam. This book covers a lot of information in approx'ly 300 pages (not including sample questions or Chapter 1). After reading both Oracle8 Concepts and Oracle8 Administrator's Guide (free Oracle documentation), this book helped pull it all together. Definitely include it in your Oracle library.
Rating:
Summary: This is a great book!
Review: If you are new to Oracle, do not mistake the Exam Cram books as the "one stop shop" for all your preparation needs. They are great books to summarize in a very concise and thorough manner 90% of what's needed to pass the exam. This book covers a lot of information in approx'ly 300 pages (not including sample questions or Chapter 1). After reading both Oracle8 Concepts and Oracle8 Administrator's Guide (free Oracle documentation), this book helped pull it all together. Definitely include it in your Oracle library.
Rating:
Summary: I love it so much, we are getting married (the book and I)
Review: In spite of the seemingly negaive reports I whole heartedly rate this book a 5 star. It really is great book and helps u pass the exam (I scored 59/63 on the real test) and I'm an Oracle DBA since 2 yrs. Of course it is deficient in some areas such as NLS etc. but it contians so much inforation and can be used as a quick reference any time. Combinead with any good Reference book this is a sure way to get thru the exam with a hit database hit ratio! Best of luck
Rating: 
Summary: Not bad, but...
Review: Overall, it's not a bad book. It covers some topics very well, but other topics are covered in reference-style. What's worse is that there are 3 or 4 topics not covered at all. There are some mistakes too, but the explained questions are good. Considering the fact that there are not many OCP DBA training materials, you should read this book and try to use it in combination with other OCP stuff.
Rating:
Summary: This book is very good
Review: The author has done a very good work, like other exam cram books. However, I will advise the author to review and issue a new edition that will include NLS and Audit. In summary, I would like to commend the author for a good job. I will send some useful comments/corrections to the author/ publisher that could be useful for new edition of the book. With other reference materials(Couchman's book - though not very good for inexperience DBAs because of some errrors, cramsession review notes and Oracle manuals, STS Practice test) I was able to score 62/63.
Rating: 
Summary: Bad book for exam preparation
Review: This book as the name indicates is a good book to cram for the exam after you understand the material from other more detailed books and experience. It is very organized and to the point (the point being the exam). I suggest every one who wants to sit for the OCP exam should read it. If you have used the Cram book for the SQL & PL/SQL exam and was disappointed with it(like I was) you won't be disappointed with this one. The only thing that was missing from this book is NLS. There is no mention of the subject. However, there were three questions on my exam regarding this subject.
Rating:
Summary: No Coverage of NLS national language support
Review: This book does not cover National Language Support and although its a small topic on the OCP exam the material is very simple and should not have been omitted from this book. This is not a good introduction to Oracle Database Administration and its not a particularly good review either, mostly because of the annoying use of a diagrammatic command - clause - option syntax. Every command and its associated clauses and options is shown in a vast unfriendly diagram that doesn't familiarize you with the actual look of server manager commands. Without the familiar look you'll be hard pressed to memorize the considerable compexity of administration commands. The questions at the end of the chapters are more difficult than OCP exam questions, in part because many questions offered in the book are poorly written. However, considering there are so few innexpensive sources of practice questions, I would reccommend the use of the practice questions in this mediocre guide. A significantly better exam preparation, for the Database Adminstration exam only, are the relevant chapters of the Oracle 8 DBA certification Exam Guide by Jason Couchman.
Rating:
Summary: Good as a reference, but other books are needed to pass exam
Review: This book is good as a reference manual and there are some good sample exams attached at the end of the chapters. However, you need to read a lot more somewhere else to pass the exam. The style: The material in general is highly condensed and organized in a "handbook" manner like the O'reilly Nutshell series and is good as a quick reference manual. Material: It misses some of the topics and concepts, for example: National Language Support is not there at all (3 questions in the actual exam). Some of the important topics are just written in the "reference manual" fashion and missed out some explanation. For instance, some of the sample tests in the book have questions that is not described in the chapter. Although the back of the chapter points you back to the official Oracle Manual, that defeats the purpose of an Examcram book. Accuracy: Some of the material contradicts with other reference material. For example: the database Import order - Chapter 8 sample test question 2. is different from pg. 16-43 in the oracle course material. The same question popped up in the REAL exam! To be fair, I still haven't found any "exam book" that covers all of the material in the exam.
Rating:
Summary: Beware if you are going for the 8i version..
Review: This probably was a good book for 8.0.x but for 8i this book is far too easy! The questions in the book are highly similar to (or same as) those in the Self-Test software (from Oracle). However, I found the exam to be lot more complex. For example, the actual exam questions try very hard to confuse you with similar sounding names for views - viz. V$TRANSACTIONS, DBA_TRANSACTIONS, ALL_TRANSACTIONS, USER_TRANSACTIONS as choice for an answer! It is important to know the "exact" name of the view - this is hardly challenged in any of the questions in this book. Overall, the questions in the book helped me answer about 25% of the exam. For the rest I had to rely on reading the actual manuals and experience. Phew, glad to get over it! Good luck!! Off to the next exam..
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