My Favorite Oracle Books

OCP Instructors Guide for Oracle DBA Certification by Chris Foot - this book is written by Chris Foot, a personal friend, a DBAzine blogger, and one of the top Oracle instructors in the world. Chris' experience teaching shines through as he clearly explains the topics that are most troubling to Oracle students. This interesting and readable book is very highly recommended.

Oracle Expert: One on One by Thomas Kyte - this book contain a wealth of knowledge on developing Oracle applications, as well as great advice on designing and administering Oracle databases. There are sections on general design and implementation practices, application architecture, locking and concurrency, transactions and rollbacks, importing and exporting, and lots more of interest to developers.

Oracle Insights: Tales of the Oak Table - a completely unique book. It is both entertaining and educational, a tough trick to pull off. Written by a cadre of eleven Oracle experts who have dubbed themselves The Oak Table Network, Oracle Insights offers up just what its title implies. One chapter of the book is devoted to a history of Oracle Corp., another covers the dreaded disease of "compulsive tuning disorder," and there is even a full frontal attack on RAID free, four, and five. Ya just gotta read it. (Note: I reviewed this in more depth previously in my blog; check it out here.)

Oracle Database 10g: The Complete Reference by Kevin Loney - the latest edition of this popular guide introduces the fundamental commands and techniques used in Oracle 10g database systems, and how to develop applications using Oracle and SQL. Other topics covered include PL/SQL structures, object-oriented and Java features in the Oracle database, the data dictionary, database optimizers, and the application server.

Learning Oracle PL/SQL by Bill Pribyl and Steven Feuerstein - clearly teaches PL/SQL in a variety of ways such that it is useful to a variety of audiences including beginning programmers, new Oracle database administrators, and developers familiar with other databases who now need to learn Oracle.

Oracle Database 10g New Features: Oracle10g Reference for Advanced Tuning and Administration by Mike Ault, Madhu Tumma, Daniel Liu, Don Burleson - a very nicely done treatise on the new features of Oracle 10g that every DBA will want to know.

I'm sure there are a plethora of additional Oracle books that are worth reading, but these are the ones I've read and enjoyed. If you have a personal favorite I've omitted, feel free to add a comment with the titles and author of the book, along with a short blurb on why you recommend it.