I typically do not have much enthusiasm for technical books published by the big "textbook publishers." Too many errors, too much "intro/overview," and bad information/advice. However, this book is a gem!
I will apologize straightaway for not writing a detailed review. I am too busy to do one. However, I think it's better that I review it now, than forget to review it at all.
Already I own several MySQL books (and some PHP/MySQL books), including Wrox and O'Reily books. Lately, however, I've only used them as a basic "reference" when building websites. Back when I tried to go through each book chapter-by-chapter, I was disappointed when I tried anything complicated for a "newbie," such as joins and virtual tables. Nothing ever worked the way the books said they would! But truly, the concepts behind joins were not explained clearly *at all* and so I was not capable of troubleshooting the problems myself.
"Oracle 11g: SQL" shines in this regard! The explanations of what happens "behind-the-scenes" when you create a join or query a virtual table are so exceptionally accurate and well-explained, that not only could I create complex joins, I was even able to find and correct errors in the online tests that were part of our "web-enhanced" college course!
Aside from the lucidity of the text, the chapter was filled with practical "cases" that at least begin to hint at some of the complex ERDs one would have to create in real life. Once in a while, the instructions for the case in one chapter did not exactly match up with what had been done to the case database in another chapter, but such errors were rather obvious and did not cause problems.
If you buy this text used, make sure you buy the online access, especially if you do not want to install Oracle on your computer. Access includes a sandbox where you can view sample databases (if your teacher has set them up), or run SQL scripts to install them (downloaded from the website or copied from the CD). This allows you to practice simple beginner-level queries or to create entire databases as you please. If you follow along with examples and cases, you will occasionally need to run scripts to alter the sample databases, anyway.
This book is *superb* both in its chapter content, exercises, examples, and cases.
A few gripes:
1) The tests (or rather the test system) often re-numbers answers so that whenever you have a choice of "both a & b" the correct answers are actually a & c or some other combination. Whenever 2 answers are correct, just always pick the one that says "a & b" and you'll be fine!
2) One of the questions about joins, which I got during the "review" (which didn't count, thank goodness), was wrong in both the wording of the question and the answer.
3) When you play *online* with "bind variables" (used to store user input from an HTML form, and submit it to the database), you must change your syntax for "Oracle Express"! The book says to precede the variable name with an ampersand ("&"); however, you must use a colon (":")!
Even though I use MySQL and this textbook covered Oracle's flavor of SQL, it is the most *enlightening* relational-database textbook I have EVER, EVER read!!!
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