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Learning Oracle PL/SQL
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Author: Bill Pribyl
List Price: $39.95
Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price
ISBN: 0596001800
Publisher: O'Reilly & Associates (15 December, 2001)
Edition: Paperback
Sales Rank: 43,980
Average Customer Rating: 4.08 out of 5
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Customer ReviewsRating: 1 out of 5
Learning Oracle Maybe, But Not PL/SQL
I've been developing with Sybase and SQL Server for about 5 years with very limited experience with Oracle in that time. I purchased this book hoping to get up to speed on the differences between Oracle's PL/SQL and the Sybase/Microsoft T-SQL syntax. From the title this book seemed appropriate for the job. In short, while the book might be an adequate, albeit SLOW, introduction to Oracle, it covers very little actual PL/SQL. If you are a programer/engineer/dba looking to "learn Oracle PL/SQL", interested in practical applications of such fundamental topics as constraints, foreign keys, indexes, joins, cursors, views, triggers, corelated subqueries and the like, look elsewhere. Don't take my word for it--take a peek at the index or table of contents and you'll see that the focus of this book has very little to do with PL/SQL.
Rating: 4 out of 5
Overall very good
I've only read three chapters so far. It's been very good actually - I knew some SQL beforehand, although nothing very complicated, and it has been pretty easy for me to understand as well as very helpful for me in learning how to use PL/SQL. It has genuinely useful examples, and also provides tips as to how to perform unit testing on stored procedures and functions.Another very useful thing the author does is list common and not-as-common mistakes that a programmer may make (which may not always result in errors or exceptions), hence possibly saving you the trouble of hours of debugging. The only problem I've had with it is that he doesn't treat foreign keys as constraints. One of his sample column declarations is: "isbn VARCHAR2(100) FOREIGN KEY REFERENCES books (isbn)", but I kept getting an error until I changed it to: "isbn VARCHAR2(100), FOREIGN KEY (isbn) REFERENCES books (isbn)". I am not sure if this is a peculiarity of my installation (running Oracle 9i), but a check online reveals that many people also consider foreign keys a constraint. Except for that problem, I would have given this book 5 stars.
Rating: 3 out of 5
Fair Guide for Learning PL/SQL
I use a self-taught approach to learn new things like most people. And, like most people, I get frustrated with the lengthy superfluous nature of how-to books which throw everything in, including the kitchen sink. This book starts off well, and you can learn from it at a comfortably progressive pace, but it could use a larger scope. The author leaves a lot of code out of the book, though he does explain parts of it. In the end, the project he uses to illustrate PL/SQL becomes more complicated than it needs to be for a tutorial exercise. Still, I haven't seen anything better.
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