Special Edition Using Oracle8/8i [With CDROM]

This is a wonderful book which covers all the aspects of Oracle, including all the interfaces with Oracle. A really excellent book for DBAs and Programmer Analysts. It helped me a lot in understanding DBA part. Am excellent Que publication. I appreciate the structure and contents of the book

Granted...I am a junior DBA but this book is very good at presenting the basics with enough detail that I would definitely recommend it over many other general Oracle DBA books (including the Handbook by Oracle Press). It really helped in spelling out the exact steps to creating a database as well as installing Oracle (which for some reason many books neglect). With that said, whether you use this book or another book, it is a good idea to also purchase topic specific books (eg. Backup and Recovery, Tuning, etc.) when more detail is needed.

Technically this book covers Oracle8 topics very well giving numerous practical examples. It gives smooth learning path towards Oracle8. However, Oracle8i features are only highlighted. This is a book for both intermediate and master level as Oracle's Architecture is discussed in detail as well as performance tuning.

I bought the book because I thought it would cover 8i. It gave highlights, but no real details or examples of the authors using it. However, the coverage of Oracle8 is very good and it handles the issue of practical tuning very well.