I had picked up a copy of O'Reilly's "Oracle SQL*Plus" text. Read through the first few pages, got discouraged, and the book sat on the shelf for five years.
Since then, I have become a strong believer of "Learning by doing". Last year, I had bought this book with the same philosophy in mind. Needless to say, I was not disappointed. As the other reviewers have pointed out, the author starts with simple examples and builds on the material. Every concept is followed by at least one example.

The questions at the end of each chapter reinforce the concepts covered in the chapter. The answers (to the questions) introduce more concepts followed by more examples, and the learning process goes on and on ...

All in all, an excellent resource to learn Oracle's sqlplus.

Having said that, what this book is not is a certification guide. For those aspiring to write the Oracle certification exams will have to go an extra mile of investing time & money in another text that is specifically geared towards certifications. And this is where I am heading next.

This a good book for anyone that is interested in learning Oracle SQL. If you have a basic understanding of SQL commands, you should have no problem picking this up quickly. If you don't have any experience, the reading is easy; you shouldn't have trouble either.

This is an excellent book to explore the mechanics of Oracle's implementation of SQL. It has a good organization generally but it is a bumpy read through the material. The exercises are actually teaching points. Some of the teaching points aren't found anywhere else in the book. Reshuffling the material would make it more readable to beginning SQL developers.



The hierarchical query section needs to be updated, and the chapters detailing indexes should be expanded in a future release. This is an excellent intermediate book but may be a bit of a challenge for a newbie.



The coverage of normalization is weak and poorly done but it isn't touted as a database design book either. That should be improved in a future release.

This is an excellent book to explore the mechanics of Oracle's implementation of SQL. It has a good organization generally but it is a bumpy read through the material. The exercises are actually teaching points. Some of the teaching points aren't found anywhere else in the book. Reshuffling the material would make it more readable to beginning SQL developers.

The hierarchical query section needs to be updated, and the chapters detailing indexes should be expanded in a future release. This is an excellent intermediate book but may be a bit of a challenge for a newbie.

The coverage of normalization is weak and poorly done but it isn't touted as a database design book either. That should be improved in a future release.

You will like this book! I knew absolutely nothing about SQL, but this book will put your mind at ease. The author is easygoing and writes what could be a very tough topic in a non-intimating way. Believe me, this book will quickly become your best friend when it comes to learning SQL/Oracle. This book is so detailed that it covers every conceivable aspect of SQL/Oracle. Personally, I just wanted to learn SQL and really don't know what database I want to use at this point, but this book is an excellent way to learn SQL -- especially for those that like to learn at their own pace like I do. So, if you are a "learn-it-yourselfer" like I am, you will love it. It even has end of chapter review questions to reinforce in the learning. Plus, it's a terrific resource after you complete the chapters.

Now the downside: I would say the only confusing part is uploading the tutorial database (which you have to do from the author's website. It will take a little brainpower and a few aspirin because the directions on the author's website assume some previous knowledge. But trust me; you will eventually get it to work. I should tell you that it would be helpful, not necessary, but helpful to know a little bit about relational databases (like MS Access) before you tackle Oracle. Anther thing to know is that the author tells you that you need the Standard or Professional full editions, which would be very expensive and only necessary if you own a Fortune 500 company! But, thankfully, you do not need the full versions. All you need is the Express Edition to practice on and the book tutorials are well suited to it. The Express Edition is free software downloadable from Oracle's website, and really, it's all the casual hobbyist needs anyway and it's plenty powerful. Now, for those who are not familiar with Oracle, it has a completely different look and feel from ...like MS Access, for example. Oracle looks like DOS and initially feels just as clunky. But, it will grow on you. You also can apply the SQL concepts to Microsoft SQL Server if you want to learn another DB.

So if you are really serious and dedicated about learning databases, and don't mind a difficult initial set up, buy this book.

The content look deceptively simple. However upon further reading one finds that it covers many aspects or ORACLE SQL plus differences between ORACLE and ANSI standard.
One does need to know some relational database theory before starting to read this book though. It does cover the basic of the relational database theory but not in a depth.
However the ORACLE SQL statements and functions are very well presented and the book does cover details and use cases.

The book improves with each edition. The brief data modeling section is adequate but uses Information Engineering data models and should be updated to use UML. The treatment describing joins fails to adequately explain why you chose one over the other.

There are a few errors here and there, like the default for the DATE format mask, which is 'DD-MON-RR' not 'DD-MON-YY'. Multiple table join coverage of ANSI SQL: 1999 standard is weak but there is currently no better treatment. Hierarchical queries in the Oracle 10gR1 release perform differently than in Oracle 9i and there is no coverage of differences.

A future edition of the book should expand its treatment of recursive, or self-referencing, joins and hierarchical joins. Also, I would recommend she expand the: (a) discussion of inner, outer and full outer joins; (b) discussions and exercises to support multiple table joins; and (c) coverage of analytical SQL for data warehouses.

This book by Alice Rischert is one of the greatest Oracle SQL books ever written. I purchased the 1st edition of this book back in the day and it helped me pass the Oracle 8i OCP SQL exam. After reading the 1st edition, I was very much compelled to purchase the 3rd edition. The 3rd edition of the book is much better with all the errors from the previous versions corrected. This is the book they use for the students at Columbia University in New York. After you read this book and do all the exercises and test your thinking projects, you become a master of the subject. If you want to learn Oracle SQL, there is no greater learning tool than this book. Indeed, there is much time, effort, and loads of quality and research put into this book. The format of the book is reading and then hands-on labs which reinforce the topics you just read. After you read this book you should purchase the Oracle PL/SQL by Example third edition. It goes hand-in-hand with this book. AFterward, you'll know enough to go take the Oracle SQL and PL/SQL exam.