RE: Books for beginner - learning PL/SQL and/or APEX

From: Teehan, Mark <mark.teehan_at_credit-suisse.com>
Date: Mon, 28 Mar 2011 16:57:21 +0800
Message-ID: <E3CCEA4C11521E43A343441089E9E55501D40892_at_ESNG17P32003B.csfb.cs-group.com>



Sandra,  

Apex has lots of wizards for the simple stuff; so you can bang out a report, a chart or a menu in no time. Building applications that people will want to use takes a lot more time- but - you will be impressed at the depth of this product. It really seems that the Apex developers have thought of the most obscure stuff and carefully standardized it into the development interface.  

The charting product is very powerful; but the APIs shipped with Apex only let you access about 10% of its capability. Google for techniques to do this better.  

Over the last two years I've done hundreds of hours of Apex development and the best source of information is the internet. Start with the apex forum on forums.oracle.com and from there you will start bouncing to the large number of very informative blogs on Apex. As it is a web technology, far more Apex developers tend to be bloggers, and apex.oracle.com is a central point for putting live sample code up for everyone to try.
Apex development pushes quite deep into advanced PL/SQL, and this can also be a steep learning curve (collections, table functions, ref cursors that sort of thing). But it is not nearly as steep as learning javascript or .Net if you background is as an Oracle DBA.  

I found that the difficult part of Apex is getting your head around how HTML pages work - flow of control between widgets, initializing controls, passing values between HTML pages.  

After years of using my trusty directory full of scripts to manage databases, in the last 2 years I have largely switched over to a bunch of apex apps that I've written, and it has given me a whole new perspective on oracle instrumentation. Top tip from me: AWR + Apex.  

Rgds
Mark


From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org
[mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org] On Behalf Of Sandra Becker Sent: 18 December 2010 05:55
To: oracle-l
Subject: Re: Books for beginner - learning PL/SQL and/or APEX

Thanks everyone. Some good suggestions. I do have access to a couple of people who know PL/SQL and javascript, just can't bug them all the time. I'm ready to learn and start getting some useful "tools" in the hands of our customer support people. Right now they have to use SQL Developer and SQL*Plus to locate and fix issues for our customers and they don't know what they're doing so frequently cause me pain with poor ad hoc queries. Ok, so this is as much for my benefit as theirs. ;-0  

Sandy
Transzap, Inc.



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Received on Mon Mar 28 2011 - 03:57:21 CDT

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