Being a Safari subscriber, I found a pleasant surprise awaiting me in this month’s email newsletter: eBooks from SAS Publishing are now available on Safari. Having a quick look, I found a small but useful selection. Topics like the SQL procedure, the Macro language and Enterprise Guide caught my eye but there’s more than this on offer. It’ll be interesting to see where this leads…
Tag Archive for Safari
Learning about Oracle
My work in the last week has put me on something of a learning about Oracle. This is down my needing to add file metadata to database as part of an application that I am developing. The application is written in SAS but I am using SAS/Access for Oracle to update the database using SQL pass-through statements written in Oracle SQL. I am used to SAS SQL and there is commonality between it and Oracle’s implementation, which is a big help. Nevertheless, there of course are things specific to the Oracle world about which I have needed to learn. My experiences have introduced me to concepts like triggers, sequences, constraints, primary keys, foreign keys and the like. In addition, I have also seen the results of database normalisation at first hand.
Using Oracle’s SQL Developer has been a great help in my endeavours thanks to its online help and the way that you can view database objects in an easy to use manner. It also runs SQL scripts, giving you a feel for how Oracle works, and anyone can download it for free upon registration on the Oracle website. Also useful is the Express edition of the Oracle 10g database that I now have at home for personal learning purposes. That is another free download from Oracle’s website.
My Safari bookshelf has been another invaluable resource, providing access to O’ Reilly’s Oracle books. Of these, Mastering Oracle SQL has proved particularly useful and I made a journey to Manchester after work this evening (Waterstone’s on Deansgate is open until 21:00 on weekdays) to see if I could acquire a copy. That quest was to prove fruitless but I now have got the doorstop that is Oracle Database 10g: The Complete Reference from The Oracle Press, an imprint of Osborne and McGraw Hill. I needed a broader grounding in all things Oracle so this should help and it also covers SQL but the aforementioned O’ Reilly volume could return to the wish list if that provision is insufficient.
The joys of eBooks
One of the nice things about eBooks is the saving that you can make on buying one instead of the dead tree edition. And if you get one from Apress, it is the full article that you get and they keep it available so that you can download another version if you need it. You can also print the thing off if you want too but a laser printer producing double-sided prints is an asset if you don’t want your space invaded by a hoard of lever arch binders. Having a copious supply of inexpensive toner helps too as does cheap paper. Otherwise, you could spend your savings on printing the thing yourself.
The ever pervasive Safari does things a little differently from the likes of Apress. Mind you, the emphasis there is on the library aspect of the operation and not eBook selling. The result is that you can only ever download chapters, so no index or overall table of contents. You still can buy all of the chapters for a particular book, though some publishers don’t seem to allow this for some reason, but finding anything in there after you have had a read becomes an issue, especially when it’s the hard copy that you are using. Take yesterday, for instance, when trying to relocate the formatting parameters for the UNIX date function. I eventually found them in the chapters of UNIX in a Nutshell that I have downloaded and printed off but I spent rather longer looking in Learning the Korn Shell than I should have done. I know that you can search in the PDF’s themselves but that is more laborious when there is a number of files to search rather than just the one. I suppose that the likes of O’Reilly prefers you to buy paper copies of its books for more extensive use, and they have a point, but having the electronic version all in one file does make life so much easier.
Photoshop books
Having exhausted the trial time on PhotoShop Elements 5, I am now having a look at its big brother PhotoShop CS2. That has got me thinking about PhotoShop books so that I become more of the possibilities and how to use them. Having a Safari subscription as I do, that naturally became my first port of call and I seemed to find two that answered my needs. Both are by Scott Kelby and they now lie on my Safari bookshelf: The Photoshop Elements 5 Book for Digital Photographers and The Photoshop CS2 Book for Digital Photographers. Even so, I am tempted to get a dead tree version of one of them and that presents a chicken and egg dilemma: the books could help choose which software to buy and the software dictates which of them will be the more useful. That said, I suspect price and features will swing it the way of Elements 5; paying over £400 for software whose capabilities I may never need does not sound financially sensible.
Update March 5th, 2007: I have now got my mits on the dead tree edition of Scott Kelby’s The Photoshop Elements 5 Book for Digital Photographers as well as Brad Hinkel’s Focal Easy Guide to Photoshop CS2. Now for some reading…