Oracle Development Unleashed (3rd Edition)

Rating:
Summary: Good book on Oracle
Review: I've browsed many Oracle books and really couldn't find one I liked, until this one. I am a beginning Oracle developer, but an experienced DB2 and Informix developer. Although, I'm not done with all 54 chapters yet, I've found this to be a very informative book. It is very broad in it's scope, yet to gain a full understanding of PL/SQL you will need another book. Overall, I would recommend this book to developers and DBA's.

Rating:
Summary: Good book on Oracle
Review: I've browsed many Oracle books and really couldn't find one I liked, until this one. I am a beginning Oracle developer, but an experienced DB2 and Informix developer. Although, I'm not done with all 54 chapters yet, I've found this to be a very informative book. It is very broad in it's scope, yet to gain a full understanding of PL/SQL you will need another book. Overall, I would recommend this book to developers and DBA's.

Rating:
Summary: Great Book
Review: I've seen many books about Oracle, they generally talk about different features of Oracle. However, this book covers almost everything and it is even better than many Oracle Press books such as Oracle8i Beginner's Guide.

Rating:
Summary: Decent overview, but lacking developer detail
Review: If you are just starting out with Oracle, then this is a good book. However, as someone who has been programming Oracle for 3 years, I found this book to be very shallow and unhelpful. The author touches a lot of topics, but does not go into a lot of detail on any of them. What really makes me angry is that the cover of the book explicitly states "Go beyond the fundamentals." I guess when they say "fundamentals" they mean booting up the server.

Rating:
Summary: An OK Introduction to Oracle, but Not Very Advanced
Review: If you are just starting out with Oracle, then this is a good book. However, as someone who has been programming Oracle for 3 years, I found this book to be very shallow and unhelpful. The author touches a lot of topics, but does not go into a lot of detail on any of them. What really makes me angry is that the cover of the book explicitly states "Go beyond the fundamentals." I guess when they say "fundamentals" they mean booting up the server.

Rating:
Summary: Decent overview, but lacking developer detail
Review: It covers a wide range of Oracle topics and products. However, it does not get into enough detail about important developer topics, like PL*SQL specifics and SQL syntax, devoting only a chapter or two to each. It could cover more if it did not devote so much room to administrator issues, such as chapters on "Managing Diskspace" and "Performance Tuning and Optimization". If a developer has to worry about those details, then he/she is wearing too many hats and should probably not be using Oracle to begin with since there are other databases better targeted to smaller shops. Perhaps the publisher should remove "development" from the title.