Re: Which Book is best?

[Regarding good introductory books on Oracle tools and RDBMS...]

25994-kelly <mjk_at_spanky.cc.bellcore.com> wrote:
>Oracle Performance, O'Reilly

Yes, all the O'Reilly and Associates books are incredibly good. The one you refer to, however, is not a tools introduction but rather a guide for performance tuning -- hardly what was asked for.

I'm not aware of *any* overview books except for my own, which is not out yet.

There is Steve Muench's book on Forms programming. Excellent if you're a forms programmer (especially v3, and has some good advice that carries over into v4.0).

There is George Koch's pair of books, the first on Oracle v5 and v6, the second supposedly on v6 and v7 (but gives short shrift to v7, IMHO). Covers only the RDBMS (inadequately, IMHO) and a bit on SQL*Plus, but a fine intro to some aspects of the RDBMS.

[ warning: commercial message approaching ]  

Then there is my book, the _Oracle Workgroup Server Handbook_, covering all versions of Oracle Workgroup Server plus Oracle7 for Windows.

It gives an intro to all the tools that are (to be) shipped with these bundles, and some intro to relational concepts. However, since there are over 100 tools and apps out on the market for Oracle, you will not find one book that tells you about all of them*.

In any event, the _Oracle Workgroup Server Handbook_ should be out this year, around the time Oracle is supposed to release the software.

Another fine book, IMHO, is Kevin Loney's almost-released _Oracle DBA Handbook_, also from Osborne/McGraw-Hill. Kevin contributed the DBA chapter to my book, so I obviously like his stuff.

Isn't there a FAQ somewhere with all the Oracle-specific books listed?

 -Tom

-- 
Thomas Cox         tcox_at_netcom.com

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