A new guy

Sorry for the intrusion. I'm about to start studying to become OCP (new letters for the alphabet soup that should follow my name). I'm interested in learning for real, not just for the tests, and I'll be taking the self-study route. With some of the Microsoft products I learned that there is a lot of worthless information for sale, even from sources you'd think were reliable and valuable. I'd love to save the money. Any suggestions for books would be great. I've not seen many geared specifically toward learning, except for the Oracle Press test cheats, uh, guide. Those would be the ones I'd want.

Also, are there any peripheral needs I wouldn't think of? I'm still really new to databases, so any suggestions you think a network guy might not know of would be great. I've got a couple of computers networked with NT as an OS. I don't have any Unix experience, I'll be starting my ed in that right after I get Oracle certified (is that backward?). If there are hardware or software needs I'm skipping, please let me know. I'll need the Oracle software, obviously, but there's a blur of it available for trial from their website. Which should I get to best start my education?

I know this is a lot of hand-holding. Thanks for any info you can give.

Steven Received on Sun Aug 15 1999 - 09:28:18 CDT