In all honesty, I’ve not managed to get Oracle working properly yet. When I upgraded my RedHat 7 machine to 8 it still worked, when I installed it from scratch it didn’t. This clearly shows that it’s possible to get Oracle 8i working, but I can’t say how!
For those that are interested, I found that it was easy to get the installer to complete, but I get the infamous “end of communication channel” error when trying to start an instance.
Introduction
The first point to note is that this book is published by O’Reilly. The second point would be that Steven Feuerstein is generally regarded to be one of the worlds leading PL/SQL experts.Those two point, on their own, were enough to clinch the purchase just over eighteen months ago.
Content
The book is, to say the least, comprehensive. When I first started to use PL/SQL I would never have guessed that there was enough there to write a thousand page book, but there is.
Credit where it’s due
I am unable to criticise a suite of products the size and complexity of Oracle on my own. There are a number of people that need to me mentioned. Remind me if I missed you out!
People
Thanks to Anna Brabants who nearly created the term ‘Oracle Comedy Errors’ and certainly did an almost continuous stream of abuse (not all of it at Oracle).
And thanks to the rest of the project team, who invariable love Oracle products as much as I do.
Introduction
For many people here, writing software is, if not a job, then a hobby. Our enthusiasm is a double-edged sword. Our technical knowledge is usually much greater than people who just develop software for a living. This sounds like a big advantage, but it’s not as large as you would have thought.Let’s have a look in ‘Software Project Survival Guide’ (SPSG) to see what Steve McConnell, famed author of ‘Code Complete’ and ‘Rapid Development,’ has to say on the subject.
This is neither a new book nor a new purchase for me, so why am I reviewing it? Bottom line: it’s a book that I’ve enjoyed a lot over the years and one that I feel the need to recommend to as many people as possible.
What’s in it?
The obvious format for a book on the personal computer industry would be chronological, but as he points out early on in the book, things just aren’t that simple. Instead he uses what, on paper, might look to be a random arrangment of anecdotes, jumping from Apple to Xerox Parc to Microsoft and IBM in the matter of a few pages. But that’s just the nature of the beast.
Eric Raymond would have us believe that everyone that develops software for fun is a hacker. I know that historically this has always been the case, but that doesn’t necessarily make it the right thing. All good, and bad, things come to an end.
I doubt that it will happen any time soon, but I think that ‘hacker’ is a term that should whither and die.
The first problem, and this is the obvious one, is the public perception of it. Yes we all know that hackers write code while crackers break into computer systems, but how many people ‘outside’ know that? How many professional software developers, i.e., those who do it just for a living rather than for fun, know that?
Introduction
This is a very strange book by almost any criteria. Firstly, much of the content is available on the web in one form or another. This includes an appendix which is literally a Usenet discussion printed. Secondly, most of the writers are techies first and writers second. You don’t get that kind of admission from most writers, even when it’s obviously true.Content
There are fifteen essays by eighteen writers. I’m not going to go through all of them, but I shall note some of the highlights.
Introduction
Steven Feuerstein’s ‘[Oracle PL/SQL Programming](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1565923359/zx81orguk00)‘ book has, over the last couple of years, become my bible on the subject of writing sizable Oracle PL/SQL programs. As I said [in my review](/computing/opinion/plsqlprogramming.html), it’s useful because it covers just about everything, including the things that don’t work.So if that book covers just about everything, why would anyone want to buy ‘Oracle Builtin Packages’?
Content
In fact, as the first chapter of the book explains, this entire book was origianlly chapter 15 of ‘PL/SQL Programming’ but Oracle complicated things by adding more to the PL/SQL programming language (all the pseudo-object oriented stuff in version 8 ) and many more new or enhanced packages. The result: either a single two thousand page monster, or two more reasonably sized tomes.
Introduction
There’s a lot of free or open source software on the net, and much been written about both that software and the process that drives it. Eric Raymond, of course, is currently the main anthropologist although Steven Levy beat him to it and there are many others.
There is also a significant amount of free documentation. One only needs to take a look at the GNU web site (their definition of a free operating system includes free documentation) or the Linux Documentation Project to see that. However, there doesn’t seem to have been a “Cathedral and the Bazaar” for free documentation, or even anything similar.
Introduction
Oddly, the main reason I’m writing this review is that I feel that the Minolta Dual Scan II has been harshly treated in the media. Most magazines seem to skip over this, the entry level, model and move on to the Scan Elite. On photo.net all are singing the praises of expensive Nikons and Canons, and complain about the lack of ICE on this model.
In a sense they are right, but everything is a compromise. Here’s why the Dual Scan II is a compromise that works for me.