Prior to this book, I had almost know experience or knowledge of the Oracle database. I really like the approach the author's used with this book. What I really want when I'm learning a new topic is to get a fairly broad, fairly shallow introduction to the material. I want the most important points summed up in a way that makes sense to a new guy. I don't want to delve deep into each topic and I don't want things explained in a way that requires me to look up and learn every other term in order to understand the points. And that is the approach the authors have taken. The point of the book isn't to make you an expert at any one area of Oracle. At lot of the book is spent discussing *why* certain features are important and how they fit into the big picture, sometimes without a lot of discussion on the features themselves. This may frustrate some readers, but I found it to be very helpful. For example, I don't need to know everything about Oracle redo logs or all the ins-and-outs of Oracle's support for business intelligence. What I *do* need to know is why the redo logs exist and a high level overview of how Oracle handles BI. This book gives you the bird's eye view of the Oracle landscape and let's you make the determination on where you need to take a closer look.



The book is well written. It's easy to read, generally very clear, and does not contain many errors (I don't think I found any).



Another really nice feature is the appendix containing a listing of additional resources where you can go to find more information about Oracle. These are broken out by chapter (i.e. topic). This is a great feature because it really helps with the next obvious step--digging deeper.



All in all, I can't recommend this book enough. An enjoyable read with a great strategy behind it.