The goal of this book is not to completely prepare you to pass the certification exam in it's entirety without other resources. It would be absurd to think this. The goal is to coach you through preparation for the exam. The book does an excellent job in explaining most of the subject matter in an easy to read format. Although it does make a few typo errors here and there, it should not take away from the value of the book. I could not have passed the test without this book unless of course I shelled out $3000 to take the prep course directly from Oracle.
I would recommend buying this book, purchasing sample test questions from Self Test Software, installing a copy of Oracle 11g on your personal computer and referencing the Oracle 11g Administration manual from time to time in order to pass the certification exam.

This book has a fairly decent walk through of the exam. The 'substance' is there but the proofreading is not. Many times this can be inferred - for example; on page 175 - it tells you to set the 'processes' parameter in the 'static' parameter file by using the 'scope=spfile' option.

alter system set processes=200 scope=spfile;

Okay - so far so good. Next page - we set the optimizer mode to the outdated 'rule' value. However - we want the change to work for the current session only - so we use the 'scope=spfile' value. (HUH??)

alter system set optimizer_mode=rule scope=spfile;

This is straight out of the book. It was obviously a mistake because they said the same value for scope did two different things. I looked it up the 'alter system' command on the net and found the correct scope value to affect only the current session is 'memory' - so it should actually have been:

alter system set optimizer_mode=rule scope=memory;

Makes much more sense now. The thing that kinda scares me is how many more of these little mistakes are there that are not as obvious? So I try to read this book as a 'rough in' but take it all with a grain of salt.

I don't know how many good books there are out there yet for the 11g exam - this one is OKAY. I bought this one impulsively at B&N without prior research... maybe you can find a better one.

One more thing - if you are not yet familiar with the fundamentals of a relational database (normalization, foreign keys, join types, etc.) - do NOT go off of the explanation in the beginning 'primer' chapter of this book - it is horrible and I was only able to piece it together using my prior knowledge of the same. Once it gets into the actual DBA work the writing improves.

Edit 9/10/2008 - Now that I'm further into the book I'm going to have to say; don't get this book - it's too inaccurate. Here's another example - one of their sample exam questions asks for modifiers that can be applied to a b-tree index and not a bitmap index. One of the WRONG answers was "descending". To quote: "Descending, function-based, and compound indexes can be either b*tree or bitmap.

It seemed really odd to me that you could make a bitmap index descending. So I looked it up the CREATE INDEX statement on oracle docs 11g:

ASC | DESC
(...)
Restriction on Ascending and Descending Indexes You cannot specify either of these clauses for a domain index. You cannot specify DESC for a reverse index. ****Oracle Database ignores DESC if index is bitmapped**** or if the (...)

This book has a fairly decent walk through of the exam. The 'substance' is there but the proofreading is not. Many times this can be inferred - for example; on page 175 - it tells you to set the 'processes' parameter in the 'static' parameter file by using the 'scope=spfile' option.

alter system set processes=200 scope=spfile;

Okay - so far so good. Next page - we set the optimizer mode to the outdated 'rule' value. However - we want the change to work for the current session only - so we use the 'scope=spfile' value. (HUH??)

alter system set optimizer_mode=rule scope=spfile;

This is straight out of the book. It was obviously a mistake because they said the same value for scope did two different things. I looked it up the 'alter system' command on the net and found the correct scope value to affect only the current session is 'memory' - so it should actually have been:

alter system set optimizer_mode=rule scope=memory;

Makes much more sense now. The thing that kinda scares me is how many more of these little mistakes are there that are not as obvious? So I try to read this book as a 'rough in' but take it all with a grain of salt.

I don't know how many good books there are out there yet for the 11g exam - this one is OKAY. I bought this one impulsively at B&N without prior research... maybe you can find a better one.

One more thing - if you are not yet familiar with the fundamentals of a relational database (normalization, foreign keys, join types, etc.) - do NOT go off of the explanation in the beginning 'primer' chapter of this book - it is horrible and I was only able to piece it together using my prior knowledge of the same. Once it gets into the actual DBA work the writing improves.