No comments about Oracle PL/SQL- kurz & gut.

2 comments about Oracle 7.3 Developer's Guide (Sams Developer's Guide).

1. I have two sources of documentation, this book and ORACLE documentation. ORACLE documentation has always been poor. This book is a little better but is missing a lot of details. The chart on Date Formatting Elemment is nice, however the example uses elements that are not in the chart. Most examples are not real world. I use the book daily for the lack of anything better.



2. A great book is exactly what I am looking for! This book gives pretty much a whole picture of Oracle database , not too detail , but that's fine as long as they cover area that I am interested and well-organized and some real world examples help as well. I think this book not only should be the developer's guide but also the dba's references book specially for a role like me -dba & developer.

No comments about Enhanced Guide to Oracle 8I.

3 comments about ComputingFailure.com: War Stories from the Electronic Revolution.

1. I have to admit I was drawn by the book's very provocative title, so I decided to browse through it today, to find that it is a very nice compilation of stories printed with permission, taken from publications such as the Wall Street Journal, The Industry Standard, Barron's and Time Digital.

   This is not to say that the content of the stories was bad at all. On the contrary, all of these publications are highly respectable, but if you have been a close follower of the whole dot.com shakedown process over the course of the past year and a half, and expect to find insights that will allow you to better understand the underlying reasons for it, you might be dissapointed not to find any "new" ones in this book.

   In short, in my opinion, the book does not add significantly to the whole discussion about the topic.




2. The editor (or, more accurately, compiler) of this volume is honest about how he put it together: He clipped interesting stories about unsuccessful dot.com companies and slipped them into a file. When the file was thick enough, he arranged the stories more or less topically, padded them with his file of recent non-dot.com "computer failure" articles, obtained reprint permissions and, voila!, produced a book (or, more accurately, a "book").

   The stories are grouped into chapters, and between the chapters comes the editor's intellectual contribution, consisting mostly of jejune observations that we have all seen or thought before.

   If you read The Wall Street Journal and The Industry Standard, you have already read most of this book, and the parts that you haven't read are of marginal interest. On the positive side, the articles are interesting, even though their moral is generally one that was old when Charles Dow was knee-high to a debenture: Don't throw money into an enterprise that you don't understand.

   And the moral of this review is: Throw money at this book if you want a permanent anthology of schadenfreude. Otherwise, you got some bucks to invest? Right here I have the Next Great Thing. . . .




3. I really like Robert Glass's computer books of which I've read several, but despite the title, this is NOT a computer book. This is a compilation of news reports of dot-com BUSINESS failures. There is nothing about computers in the book, except that the businesses used them. The blurb on the back of the book talks about "why software projects fail" but there is virtually nothing in the book on projects or software. Also the format is useful for illustrating ideas (for a good example see Epstein's The Case of the Killer Robot) but here there is nothing for them to illustrate - this is nothing but news reports.
   
   I was expecting something more like Neumann's Computer-Related Risks.

No comments about ORACLE TO DELIVER FIRST DATABASE FOR LINUX CLUSTERS.(Oracle8i Parallel Server for Linux)(Product Announcement): An article from: EDP Weekly's IT Monitor.

No comments about Information Industry Directory: An International Guide to Organizations, Systems, and Services Involved in the Production and Distribution of Information ... Form (Information Industry Directory).

5 comments about Oracle8 Black Book: The Oracle Professional's Guide to Implementing the Object-Oriented Features of Oracle8.

1. I bought all of the Oracle Press junk, and they molder on the shelves. Ault is great at explaining Oracle8 DBA work, and I could not do my job without this reference. The scripts are especially useful, and the scripts alone are worth the cost of this book. I can't wait for his next one. . .



2. An excellent book on Pl/Sql, i am sure glad i bought it. Well done to the author!



3. The book is good, but I have one big question!! Where are the scripts on the CD? It says on the back cover that there are "200 scripts for use with Oracle8" on the CD. I can't find them. Are you expected to handjam them out of the book onto a disk?



4. I have no idea what the other reviewers of this book are thinking. I feel seriously mislead, and am returning the book for credit. This is shovelware at its worst, a random unedited pile of hacks, thinks, and yawns thrown together without thought, direction or inspiration. It should never have been published. Books like this are what keeps those Giant Computer Book Sale operations in business.



5. I am not an experienced DBA, but mainly a Java developer. However I thought this book would be a useful reference when doing any Oracle related development projects. I was greatly mistaken. Myself, or my colleagues have never found anything useful in it. So if you want a good Oracle reference, I'd look elsewhere!

No comments about LINUX NETWORX OFFERS ORACLE-CERTIFIED CLUSTERS.(Linux NetworX Eclipse Database Cluster)(Product Announcement): An article from: Software Industry Report.

No comments about SGI SETS WORLD RECORD FOR ORACLE E-BUSINESS PERFORMANCE.: An article from: UNIX Update.

1 comments about Electronic Discourse: Linguistic Individuals in Virtual Space (Suny Series in Computer Mediated Communication).

1. The conclusion drawn from the research run by Davis/Brewer, that electronic communication has both attributes of oral and written language is irrelevant, I guess, for most of today's electronic communication. The experiment performed by Davis/Brewer was in my opinion artificial (has anyone heard about mainframe software conferencing VAXNotes??) and has hardly anything to do with the way we use email / chatrooms / blogs, which were not yet there at that time (around 1990).
   Therefore, I find this book's title overhyped and misleading, the content being far from issues of computer mediated communication and virtuality. On the positive side, authors have sound knowledge of today's linguistic theories. It is only hardcore linguists, who may somehow profit from this book. Anyone else should get an excellent Sherry Turkle's "Life on the Screen" instead.