However excellent they are, most computer books are inherently passive--readers simply take in text without having any opportunity to react to it. The Oracle PL/SQL Developer's Workbook is a different kind of animal! It's designed to engage you actively, to get you solving programming problems immediately, and to help you apply what you've learned about PL/SQL--and in the process deepen your knowledge of the language. By tackling the exercises in this workbook, you'll find yourself moving more rapidly along the learning curve to join the growing ranks of PL/SQL experts. The Oracle PL/SQL Developer's Workbook is a companion to Steven Feuerstein's bestselling Oracle PL/SQL Programming and his other PL/SQL books from O'Reilly. It contains a carefully constructed set of problems and solutions that will test your language skills and help you become a better developer--both with PL/SQL and with other languages. Exercises are provided at three levels: beginner, intermediate, and expert. The workbook exercises cover all the major features of PL/SQL, including those new to Oracle8i (e.g., Java and web features, autonomous transactions, and bulk binds). You'll find chapters on:

• Basic language elements--variables, naming, loops, conditional and sequential control, exception handling, and records.
• Data structures--index-by tables, nested tables, variables arrays (VARRAYs), and object technology.
• Database interaction--cursors, DML and transaction management, cursor variables, and native dynamic SQL
• Program construction--procedures, functions, blocks, packages, database triggers, and calling PL/SQL functions in SQL.
• Built-in functionality--the character, date, conversion, numeric, and miscellaneous functions, and the DBMS_SQL, DBMS_PIPE, DBMS_OUTPUT, UTL_FILE, and DBMS_JOB built-in packages.
• Miscellaneous topics--using Java with PL/SQL, external programs, PL/SQL web development, tuning PL/SQL, and PL/SQL for DBAs.