I was attracted by the title: programmer to programmer. I expected the book would have quite a lot of examples just like Oracle8 pl/sql programming by Scott Urman or SQL Server 2005 T-sQL recipes by Joseph Sack. Besides, the book has quite a lot of grammatical mistakes. I have returned the book.

I have read all the books on Oracle and most seem pretty fluffy - lots of pages but the content is on a pretty basic level. This is the first book I have seen that really delves into the guts of Oracle - how it works, and how to program applications effectively for it. Just what I have been looking for!!!

I have read all the books on Oracle and most seem pretty fluffy - lots of pages but the content is on a pretty basic level. This is the first book I have seen that really delves into the guts of Oracle - how it works, and how to program applications effectively for it. Just what I have been looking for!!!

This is an intermediate level book. It is intended for the application developer who already has some knowledge of SQL (which implies some knowledge of what databases do) and of programming (particularly Java). For instance, the first chapter of this book is on the internal structure of Oracle. That's a long ways from the standard beginning of this is what a database does.

A thing this book is not for is the database administrator. There's very little on things like set-up, assigning users, security (there's a little on this); those kinds of administrative details. This book is, as I said at first, for developers.

The book does go heavily into programming techniques like triggers, regular expressions, object types, XML, defining your own functions -- things like that.

The authors all have extensive experience with Oracle, most of them work for or have worked for Oracle. As this series of books proclaims, this is a book written at the programmer to programmer level.