Re: Cost of printed books (was Re: Online Books)

My answer to your original question was with all the "private" Oracle books that I have read in mind, not the official Oracle documentation. I could almost attach individual authors names to the your list above. But that would not be helpful and these guys ( I think they are all guys) are way beyond my competance in the subject, therefore cannot be judged by me, who does not want any truck with layers, especially American ones.

Sticking to the official Oracle documentation, and giving you my opinion anyway.
- verbose, formal prose, - No I don't think so, its written in quite an 'easy' manner.
- stating the obvious, - Well its a manual it kinda has too. - long examples where the key point only takes 2-3 lines of code, - The examples are pretty concise.
- discussion of internals that the user can't do anything with, - Maybe, not pointing out what's important what's not. - exhaustive discussion of possibilities that could be trimmed, - Yes, more detailed tabular information instead of prose is maybe required. - passages meant to persuade rather than inform, - No evidence of this.

• not covering all possible uses of a feature, - Yes, the manuals do not cover everthing.
• not listing all restrictions, - Again the manuals do not cover everthing.
• not explaining how a feature works in combination with others, - Most features in Oracle are described in their own terms, not in combination with others. A lot is assumed about the reader.
• more examples needed, - More examples of combinations of features and real world examples.
• features not mentioned at all, - It takes quite a trawl to find new features in a new Oracle release. They are eventually mentioned, but where?
• discussion split across multiple books and so impossible to follow, - This is difficult, Oracle is such a vast subject it cannot help but have items split across volumes.
• lack of information about recent enhancements to a feature, - Oracle do not blow their own trumpet very much regarding new features or enhancements to the RDBMS. Maybe some of their email shots should contain more technical material, a small technical bulletin perhaps.
• relevant book exists but not part of the doc library, - nothing to comment. > > or other ways that information could be missing?

As an example of the manual being vague. - I wish to have a number of DBMS_JOB's running each night at the following times job1=21:01, job2=21.02, job3=21.03. That is, starting within a minute of each other at the same time (21:01, 21:02, 21:03) every night. Now that is a simple enough 'real world' request. Try to find how to do that just by reading the manuals.

> You must read the IBM AIX XL Fortran/6000 Version 3 User's Guide. :-) I will, I really will.

Oracle is a good and essential product. I like and admire Oracle. It is let down a little by the standard and depth of its documentation. It has a very large and successful education and training arm.

George Barbour. Received on Thu Jan 17 2002 - 10:27:39 CST