Guide to Oracle8i Features Book

This package from O'Reilly is a wonderfully comprehensive resource for anyone working with Oracle. On the CD-ROM is the full text of seven authoritative tomes: five of which are chunky books and two useful pocket references (though their pocketability is somewhat reduced in this format).The CD-ROM provides a web interface with a combined index for all the texts, citing the source book and giving a clickable link. It's not a perfect index, however: searching for "definer rights", a five-page section in one book, produced no entry. But isn't that always the way with indexes? They're stuffed with entries except for the ones you want.The superhumanly industrious Steven Feuerstein is either sole or joint author of all bar one of these books and his approachable writing style on such weighty topics is always welcome. Despite that, none of these books is an ideal introduction to Oracle for the complete beginner--all are aimed at those with development experience, who are programming or who intend to start. Whatever the goal, whether it's gaining an understanding of built-in packages (which let you associate related program elements for re-use time and time again) or producing a web-based database application, there is likely to be something relevant in this collection of goodies. --Mark WhitehornRead More