For the past ten years, O'Reilly's Oracle PL/SQL Programming has been the bestselling book on PL/SQL, Oracle's powerful procedural language. Packed with examples and helpful recommendations, the book has helped everyone--from novices to experienced developers, and from Oracle Forms developers to database administrators--make the most of PL/SQL.

The fourth edition is a comprehensive update, adding significant new content and extending coverage to include the very latest Oracle version, Oracle Database 10g Release 2. It describes such new features as the PL/SQL optimizing compiler, conditional compilation, compile-time warnings, regular expressions, set operators for nested tables, nonsequential collections in FORALL, the programmer-defined quoting mechanism, the ability to backtrace an exception to a line number, a variety of new built-in packages, and support for IEEE 754 compliant floating-point numbers.

The new edition adds brand-new chapters on security (including encryption, row-level security, fine-grained auditing, and application contexts), file, email, and web I/O (including the built-in packages DBMS_OUTPUT, UTL_FILE, UTL_MAIL, UTL_SMTP, and UTL_HTTP) and globalization and localization.

Co-authored by the world's foremost PL/SQL authority, Steven Feuerstein, this classic reference provides language syntax, best practices, and extensive code, ranging from simple examples to complete applications--making it a must-have on your road to PL/SQL mastery. A companion web site contains many more examples and additional technical content for enhanced learning.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 90 Ratings

Impossibly long yet incomplete - 2008-04-17
Reviewer Rating:
This book is so incredibly long and verbose that it is impossible to use to actually learn PL/SQL in a self-directed manner. Each of its numerous long chapters is so focused on a small, isolated sub-topic of PL/SQL that it spends over 500 pages just to cover the basics of PL/SQL. At that point, 500 pages into the book it says, "by now you have mastered the basics of PL/SQL" and begins a series of long chapters on small, isolated advanced sub-topics.

Incredibly, the book does not cover or even mention the essential, crucially important "Windows Functions" added to the ISO SQL standard in 2003. A professional must, repeat must, know those "Windows Functions."

Computer science students who are reading this book under the auspices of a college professor will undoubtedly learn a great deal from this book during many, many hours of reading it in the context of a two semester course where their professor discusses with them the essential points. That however is little comfort to a working professional who needs to get answers to real world Oracle SQL problems in a hurry. For a working professional who needs to get real work done and does not have time to spend weeks reading, this book is practically useless.

#1 PL/SQL Book For A Reason - 2008-10-22
Reviewer Rating:
This is The Ultimate PL/SQL reference. Although the book isn't written as a reference, it serves as a more useful reference than the Oracle documentation. This book will show you 99% of PL/SQL functionality, and 110% of what you need to know. Steven Feuerstein always manages to write at a level which is not dry like 99% of all tech books out there. What a refreshing perspective he has for PL/SQL.

This book can be used for learning or refreshing on certain PL/SQL topics, but it isn't the best layout for someone new to PL/SQL, who needs that hand holding step by step approach. For now, novices might want to choose another book to learn the ropes, then get this book to serve as their #1 reference after they know the basics.

By the time I got through the first three chapters, I came across PL/SQL and SQL Plus functionality that I consider essential to the role of an Oracle developer, of which about half of my peers do not fully know. 95% of my peers, and their peers would learn multiple things they did not know before simply by reading through the first three chapters. Steven covers the majority of necessary "tribal knowledge" that an Oracle developer just needs to know here, before going into the more functional and applicable details in the rest of the text.

The rest of the book is ordered in a fashion so that you can easily go straight to the functionality that you need to learn, refresh, or learn more about. If I need to brush up on triggers, exception handling, collections, etc., I simply jump to the chapter aptly named for each piece.

The real brilliant part of Steven's writing for these individual sections is that after he covers all of the details of a certain topic, Exception Handling, for instance, he provides well written suggestions on how to really apply this topic in the most appropriate manner, where most books would just leave the topic alone, after covering the "how-to"! After Steven explains all of the ins and outs of exception handling (which he does in a much more thorough fashion than all other documentation), he then goes on to teach you how to actually USE the tool he has explained. The exception handling chapter has sections on "Building an Effective Error Management Architecture" and "Making the Most of PL/SQL Error Management". Instead of just showing his readers "How do I do that?", he shows them How, and then proceeds to pour his expertise into the What, When, and Why of the subject.

The sections explaining each "core" PL/SQL functionality are the most in depth explanations I have seen in any documentation, with code examples for literally every bullet point in the book. The code examples are all in anonymous blocks which can literally be copied and pasted into an IDE. There are also many more code examples not in the book that are available online in a zip file.

Extra kudos to Steven for including sections on xml types and http data manipulation which are highly sought after skills in software development.

My only complaint is that I wish there was a search-able PDF file of the book that came with it, like Oracle Press books have. If there was, I would use it for ALL PL/SQL questions that I usually "Google" for the answer. Even so, buying the book gives you a free 45 day access to safari online so you can search through this book there.

Use this book often as your first PL/SQL reference, along with Feuerstein's PL/SQL Best Practices book, and you will be better equipped than 95% of PL/SQL developers out there.

If you are responsible for PL/SQL coding, this book needs to be on your desk. Period.

This is how it really works in the real world - 2009-10-27
Reviewer Rating:
There are always 2-3 books every developer has in their area of expertise and if you're using PL/SQL, the Feuerstein book is one of them.

I'm not sure how much someone can get out of it if they never did work coding before and you're trying to learn it but I can think of many many times I needed an example for a specific problem and the book had a great example of how to do it.

Also I warn people to be careful because especially for the later chapters, they evolve to the answer to the problem and the cognitive method for this book is to follow along to the end to see how it got there - I think to some of the reviewers this is verbose but this really sinks the PL/SQL concept into your brain effectively and in my experience it's clearly worthwhile. I'm amazed (as always) how clear the evolution is if you take the time to follow it.

I might also add if you're not doing PL/SQL for work but trying to learn it, the evolution might not make sense it's very obvious to me the author has hard core real experience to approach the topics the way he does it.

For people in the field, I'd even say if you're a brand new developer on a job or programmed in something else and are approaching PL/SQL for the first time, the examples are more than clear enough and the opening chapters cover relatively universal and simple concepts so I believe the book is extremely beneficial for beginners as well as very advanced PL/SQL developers.

Oracle PL/SQL - 2009-10-19
Reviewer Rating:
Oracle PL/SQL Programming is another of the high quality books that O'Reilly publishes. It covers everything you need to know from the initial description of PL/SQL all the way up to complex conditionals, procedures, functions, packages and application security. A handy tool for the Oracle toolbox.

O'Reilly Oracle books - 2009-08-31
Reviewer Rating:
I started learning Oracle over a week ago and started with Learning PL/SQL which started out good but it was hard to follow. I have the Oracle PL/SQL book out of the library and I also as finding it hard to follow; the material is disorganized...

In addition, you can download some examples from O'Reilly but they are not complete or incorrect (or even helpful). Some of the examples have not been touched in a long time but I do not believe anyone reviewed the code...

I would recommend the book, Oracle Database 11g SQL by Jason Price, as a much better alternative to this book. The book is methodical in its approach in teaching Oracle...

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