Learning Oracle PL/SQL

Organization of This Book

Learning Oracle PL/SQL differs from other PL/SQL books in several important ways:

Kinder, gentler organization

Other programming books are often organized around language features, with a chapter for datatypes, one for loops, and another for exceptions. Such a "feature-oriented" volume works fine if you already know roughly how you want to accomplish a given programming task—you flip to the part of the book that covers the technique you want to use. And, if you don't quite know how you want to solve your problem, you merely read the book from cover to cover and assimilate its entire contents. Or not.

In contrast, the chapters in this book are arranged in order of increasing complexity, each chapter building on the previous one. I encourage you to read this book straight through, from front to back (or at least as far as you can get), rather than leaf or browse through it as you would a reference book.

The fact is that if you're just getting started with a new language, you are unlikely to know what features you will need to use to accomplish your programming goals (even if you doknow what your programming goals are). When this book presents a new language topic, it usually appears in the context of a given functional objective. So, for example, to introduce the idea of PL/SQL packages, we didn't write a separate chapter about packages that documents the syntax and throws in some contrived examples. Instead, the book proceeds along with the business ...