Oracle Database 10g PL/SQL Programming Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)The book is a large survey of the PL/SQL language and introduces many new things that have changed with 10g. But there is a major problem with the book, which runs throughout almost all Oracle Documentation.
The book is written more as a corporate training manual than that of a programming text book. As probably everyone who ever took a training class from their company knows, training is often done by people who not only are not educators, but may not actually understand or have even used the subject of the training. It is intentional that such people do not state the concepts abstractly - they only know concrete examples and maybe only the example in their pre-written material.
This book fits this description to a T. It does not specify the correct syntax except in examples. It does not specify the qualifications and conditions governing the language elements or the examples. As such, unless you are essentially copying an example almost verbatim, you have no real knowledge of whether your code will compile, let alone work as intended. As an example consider their discussion of SELECT statements. They speak about the Select clause, the INTO clause, etc. Nowhere do they state that the list of items in the INTO clause should separated by commas. Although most people could correctly guess that the comma is the separator, you need to find an example to show you that. The book is rampant with omissions like this. Two pages later, they use an OPEN - FOR construct in an example without introducing it. That it can be used dynamically, i.e. with the query in a character string constructed at run time, is not only not mentioned in this section, but is not even mentioned in the chapter on Dynamic SQL.
This should be looked upon as a book of (simple) examples. It should be no one's text or reference.

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Create dynamic client/server applications using PL/SQL and the comprehensive information contained in this authoritative volume. Expert Oracle insiders cover the features of PL/SQL, explain scripting semantics and syntax, and fully detail the PL/SQL functionality of Oracle Database 10g. You'll learn how to write powerful PL/SQL programs, interact with Oracle databases, perform complex calculations, and handle error conditions.

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