Ocp Introduction to Oracle9i: SQL Exam Guide [With CD-ROM]

What helped me most were the three practice exams. Yes, I agree there a few mistakes, but if you score 90% or above on the practice exams and understand the reasons for the right as well as wrong answers, I can gurantee that you will pass the OCP "Introduction to Oracle9i: SQL" Exam(1Z0-007), as I did. Watch out for the questions you get right for the wrong reason or the questions for which your guess was right. That is not really understanding the subject.

It had some errors here and there, but the book was well written, and was easy to sift through. Out of the three Oracle Press books I have read on 9i certification, this is probably the best in the series.

This book is a great read despite the mistakes and typos littered about its pages. Its not dry or overdone like many prep books - it's just right. In addition, it's a super value considering it's hardcover and official. My book included a CD with excellent practice test software which helped me drill in some of the tough topics.This book is also a great place to start if you know nothing about the workings of an Oracle database. Some other cram type books leave you to figure out many of the nuts and bolts on your own so you can't put together the whole picture. This book doesn't do that. It takes you through gently but briskly giving you a solid ground to work from.After reading it, I passed on my first try with the help of an 8i Cram book because there were about 4 or 5 questions on the test that the book did not cover. This leads to my only real dissappointment. The fact is that it the book is just not detailed enough in just a couple areas.In the end, I give it 5 stars. I have read 5 certification prep books (2 Oracle) in the past few months and this is the best and my absolute favorite because of its easy to read content and its hard to beat value. Happy studying.

The book is very well organized and easy to follow. It is an excellent tool to prepare for the OCP. I strongly agree with the other reviewers that there are some errors in the book that are frustrating. I was pleased that there is a nice errata web page posted ... and this helped me edit the text so I was studying the correct information for the OCP. I am VERY disappointed with the CD_ROM software that comes with the textbook and provides interactive questions to prepare for the OCP. There are incorrect answers provided in this software, so the end result is that I found myself dilligently learning wrong answers for the OCP. There is no errata for the CD-ROM. You're on your own figuring out what's correct and what's incorrect. It's a dangerous tool to use due to the fact you can study very hard and the end result will be that you learned wrong answers to the OCP test. Perhaps an easy solution to this problem could be to simply have errata included on the existing errata web site for the CD-ROM questions. The CD-ROM questions have unique numbers, so it would be easy to post the correct answers to these questions on the errata web site. In the meantime I'm focusing on the book and leaving the CD-ROM unused. The book though is excellent. The author did a super job, and I hope the other three Oracle Press books that follow in the Oracle 9i OCP sequence are as good as this one is.

This book has quite a few errors that I have discussed with colleagues in the field. Some of the errors are facts that were true in previous versions, 7.3 for example, but are no longer applicable. This would probably be caused to the pulling of material from previous PL/SQL versions. All examples I've used worked fine though. The errors are frustrating because I don't know whether to remember the errors for the test, or to give the actual correct answers for the test. An example of an error is that the book states that an ORDER BY clause cannot be used in a sub query, but as of Oracle 8i, this is no longer the case. The practice tests from selftestsoftware.com don't indicate that the errors are even asked, so I am hoping that they are inconsequential. As time goes by, errata will be published on the oraclepress.com website which will correct the errors. I submitted 3 errors last week, but they have not yet been posted as of yet.The good part is that this is an Oracle Press book that is a subset of McGraw-Hill Publishing. Oracle Press has a close relationship with Oracle, so it is the most accurate book for the OCP exams to date. Another plus is that when taking the selftestsoftware.com practice tests, the errors that you made point to subjects that are almost word for word chapters names from this book, so reviewing deficiencies in the test are pretty straight forward. This book is very well written and is easy to understand and is interesting if you are interested in Oracle. The new 9i OCP exams only cover SQL and not PL/SQL, so it's not quite the phone book I was expecting, but it has plenty of material. As all Oracle Press / Osborne books, this is useful for future reference after the OCP exam is passed, and some of the details have been forgotten. If it weren't for the errors, which are inevitable in any first edition from the first publisher of any technical book, I would give it 5 stars. The best methodology I've found for taking any certification exam is to purchase a practice test for the exam, take a calibration test of a small subset (say 20 or 30 questions) then note the errors. Once you find the subjects you need to review, go to the book and read the chapters then take another subset until you get a passing score (it's best to repeat until you get a high score, such as 95% because you are going to memorize some of the questions).