If you are looking for a brief overview of everything, this book is for you. An developer/administrator looking for detail on any one topic will not find much use for this book.

This is the book to start learning Oracle. This book assume that you know nothing and from there it builds your Oracle Skills. Oracle is very vast but this book has nicely covered all the basic aspects of Oracle that you will need in your day to activity. No doubt that this book will not make you an Oracle Expert but definitely you will learn to move forward. This is the starting point.... This book will make your base for Oracle.

I cannot keep this book on my desk my cube and have finally ordered more copies for the rest of the crew. It is a terrific reference for anyone using or developing Oracle products. It is very well-written and contains an index that should be a model to the writers and editors of all technical manuals.

For a book with "Reference" in the title, this book is very poor at providing me with any information I look for in it. Virtually every time I try to find some topic in the book, it isn't there. If I do find what I need in it, the wording and description is so poor that I don't get much out of it. This book is worth having in your library if you are an Oracle DBA, but "Expert Oracle9i Database Administration" by Sam R. Alapati is far and away superior, both in content and in writing style. If you are looking for an Oracle9i book, start with Alapati's book first.

I've read about 30 Oracle books. I wanted to find this book useful, but after 100 pages, I could not stomach it. Bad examples, poor verbiage, lousy structure, since oracle writers have little competition, the demands for quality are not that great. I found Sams series books much more useful.