Re: Bad Generalisations by Don Burleson

Well, as an author with about a dozen titles (most out of print thanks to the Coriolis collapse) I feel I can comment here. Is it possible to know everything about Oracle DBA? hell no! I learn more everyday. It is a seven day a week job to keep up and try to stay accurate with advice. Do authors cut and paste? Yes, it is almost impossible to completely write a book without taking advantage of fair-use rules. DO we make mistakes? yes, we are human, in addition, remember that we have to deal with reviewers who know less than we do in most cases, copyeditors who believe everything is PROSE and must conform to all rules of usage and the pressure of page counts and deadlines. The book is being sold well in advance of the time it is finished, and sold at a specific price that is based on the projected page count, if you exceed this then the publisher has to take a bath on production costs. Some books, like the examcram series where made delibrately short (400 pages) to keep them information dense and focused.

My latest, due out at the end of the month, has 1024 pages give or take a few and that was the max page count. I could have filled twice that to cover everything that a DBA should know about 9i. I had to practice triage on the informaiton presented, is it really going to be used by DBAs or just once in a while?

I hope I have shown that I will admit my mistakes, explain my opinions and, if shown the errors of my ways, make require corrections.

Mike Ault
Oracle7.0 Administration and Management
Oracle8 Administration and Management
Oracle8i Administration and Management
Oracle9i Administration and Management (Due out this month) ExamCram OCP Oracle7.3 Test 1 and 2
ExamCram OCP Oracle7.3 Test 3 and 4
ExamCram OCP Oracle8 SQL and PL/SQL
ExamCram OCP Oracle8 Tuning (With Josef Brinson) ExamCram OCP Oracle8i SQL and PL/SQL
Oracle8 BlackBook
Unix Administrators Companion
Oracle8i Architecture and Administration Workshop ElementK Dozens of articles, presentations, whitepapers

allanwtham_at_yahoo.com (godmann) wrote in message news:<95cd51c.0205110727.2a17aa8f_at_posting.google.com>...
> >I enjoy books by authors who have really worked and spent a lot of
> >time with their subjects, and put their insight (and what they learned
> >from their mistakes) into their book, such as Tom Kytes, Steve Adams,
> >Jonathan Lewis, James Morle. What I really do not like is people who
> >edited Oracel Docs, Metalink Notes, plus their speculation, and there
> >are way too many this type of books!
>
> Reading Oracle books is my hobby! Well, I am glad I have books by the
> this group of authors. I truly believe that a real good book can only be
> written by authors who are on the field implementing, trouble-shooting,
> tuning etc cuz only that there are real experiences to back up what they say
> in their books. I collect a lot of Oracle books and it would be good to have
> more quality-assured books out there.
>
> Allan W. Tham
> Oracle DBA
Received on Mon May 13 2002 - 07:59:34 CDT