Sams Teach Yourself PL/SQL in 21 Days

I am a professional Accountant/ Auditor (CPA from USA) and heading finance division in a corporate, with a turnover over $ 2 billion. As our organization is undergoing ERP and I have been made as Implementation Committee member from the client side, I have been looking into Oracle. I don't have any knowledge of any programming language except that I am an extensive good user. In order to interact effectively and out of curiosity, I decided to learn Oracle 8i (SQL and PL/ SQL) and Developer 2K. I attended a fortnight training session given to our EDP guys. As the training was meant for those guys who are already in the field, it was not effective upon me and I could not grasp much. Further I was hesitant to ask my doubts, since otherwise it would slower the pace of the training. I purchased various books from Oracle Press but I found the reading was cumbersome, since it had not been built on a good foundation for lay guys like me. In a hard way, I learnt SQL from the training, books and well-learnt friends and was thorough with that, while I was finding PL/SQL as difficult to learn. I came across this book when perusing thru a bookshop. I liked the way it has been organized. It is 21 days course material with 3 to 5 hours each day and built nicely from day 1. In the week I, one learns basics of PL/SQL and building blocks, in week II, he/ she will learn some of the more advanced features and will also learn how to use PL/SQL in conjunction with a data base. In the final week, Oracle's built in packages have been taught. The book is meant for absolute beginners like me (who have some adequate knowledge of SQL). I have been transformed into a person who has a fairly good knowledge of PL/SQL, after fully going thru the book I am able to understand what sort of codes are written by my Oracle friends and consultants. My colleagues and bosses are admiring my PL/SQL knowledge. Often now I have been placed in the Interview committee to select staff for EDP department along with EDP guys and I have been always asking questions from the Q & A, Quiz, exercises material from this book. Probably one of the coming days, I may even head our EDP department, who knows? Over all, this book is excellent for beginners for learning PL/SQL.

I generally agree with the other reviewers on this book - despite some errors, it is a solid set of PL/SQL lessons. Great results can be produced by using the book as designed (download a copy of Personal Oracle, and spend three hours a day hacking the & @:=#! out of it). However, these favorable reviews can be misleading, as they lack a "Who is this book for?" section. Unlike many "Teach Yourself" titles, this is not good reading for the absolute novice. To get the most from this book, you should have:1. Functional and theoretical knowledge of at least one high-level programming language.2. A good understanding of database theory and terminology.3. Some experience with SQL (and ideally with Oracle, but if you can make Access do tricks, you'll be fine).4. Three weeks off. ;-)

This is a great beginners book for pl/sql syntax, and it is also useful as a quick reference. I found it very helpful when doing advanced pl/sql as well. Overall, an excellent text.

This book is pretty good. Each of the 21 lessons takes a couple of hours to read, so the pace is about right. I learned a lot of PL/SQL from this book, so I'm glad I bought it.The book is pooly edited, though, and is full of errors. A couple of times there were serious errors in the example programs, but they weren't enough to spoil the book.If you have a little programming experience, you might try just using the PL/SQL chapters in the Oracle8: The Complete Reference. You're going to need a book like that anyway....