Wrox - Professional Oracle Programming

Introduction
Professional Oracle Programming is intended for application developers who use Oracle as their database. As such, this book does not devote much space to topics which are primarily of interest to database administrators, such as backup and recovery. Most importantly, this book is designed to help a programmer understand the database issues that can have a direct impact on the operation and performance of their applications.

What Does This Book Cover?
Although it is impossible to cover all the topics that a professional developer could use to the level of depth required in a single book, this volume attempts to provide a foundation for these developers, as well as guidance and examples of some of the key areas of interest and necessity. These areas include accessing data using SQL, handling issues such as multi-user concurrency and data integrity and security, the basics of programming with Java, PL/SQL and XML, and data warehousing. For a more complete list of topics, please refer to the section called “How Is This Book Structured?” later in this introduction.

Who Is This Book For?
The entire topic of Oracle databases is certainly not a new one. Oracle has been one of, if not the, leading databases in the world for almost two decades now. The standard Oracle documentation runs over 13,000 pages, and leaves out a lot of the good stuff. Determining the proper audience for this book, and writing at a level appropriate for that audience, was the biggest conceptual challenge for all of the authors. Through discussions early in this project, the authors and publishers of this book came up with a fairly distinct profile of our presumed reader. This book is intended for people whose primary job is to create application systems. They are developers, rather than database administrators.

Following through on this profile, we believe that you, the professional developer, are well informed and skilled in the creation of these application systems. In our experience, even professional developers may think of the database they use as nothing more than a place to store data. This description of you, the target reader, has guided the selection of topics as well as the actual content of this book.