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 92 Ratings

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...

Very comprehensive and thorough but heavy - 2010-01-30
Reviewer Rating:
It covers PL/SQL very well with many practical examples that can be readily used. The topics are comprehensive and the explanations are very clear. One problem: it's way to heavy to hold and read. I wish there is a Kindle version or eBook.

Next best thing to being in a class - 2009-12-06
Reviewer Rating:
If you need to learn about PL/SQL this book is the next best thing to actually being in a class. It answered so many questions and was a huge help to me.

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.

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