good book for beginners
good book for html db beginner developers. many GUI and detail instructions you can follow to develop your own application. very easy to read and play on your own.
Great Book
This is a great book, I know this becuase I've read it. I've also passed it along to other developers within my group, three, to be exact and they like it as well. I'm finding it to be much more useful then the online documentation.
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I would recommed this book to anyone who wants a great resource for Oracle HTMLDB.
My Review
I bought Oracle HTML DB Handbook, because I needed to write an application in HTML DB and I didn't know the language. With this book and google I was able to create an application with forms, tables, collections, email with links, and the ability to upload and download files.
I asked the authors a question about one of the procedures and I received a response in less than 24 hours.
The book is well worth the money.
Could have been much more useful
The authors state that this book is for beginning and intermediate htmldb developers but my opinion is that it is a confused conglomerate of descriptions of very obvious details through to details that only an advanced user would consider.
For example, there is a long description of the SQL Workshop. In my opinion, anyone who knows enough about constraints, triggers, defaults, nulls (:)) to make sensible use of this facility will be able to work out the workshop without much trouble.
In one place the authors point to useful information on the web, mainly the oracle "htmldb" home page, saying that there is no need to repeat the details in the book. On the other hand, the appendices (and other places) contain details which are readily available in manuals. I would have documented the former and referred readers to the latter.
Steps are listed in detail to perform many, often basic, functions. "and follow the prompts" would have been more than sufficient in many/most places and would have allowed the authors more space to actually get around to providing useful information. On the subject of useful information, in my opinion the manuals describe what can be done but useful information is what should be done. I purchased the book expecting the latter, that the authors would elaborate on lessons learned from experience (how-to information) so that readers would not have to go through the same pain to get workable applications most easily. But not so. The Tips and Techniques & Best Practices chapters are only 20 pages total; and are categorized as Advanced Topics. Neither is there any indication of things that logically htmldb could do for you but doesn't - such as (not) setting the max length of fields and incorporating column comments.
Want to know about checkboxes? Radio buttons? Well, don't expect to find index entries for these. Not what I would expect from a handbook.
There is detail on replacing XL and MSAccess with htmldb. Maybe this should have been left to a book on XE. In any case, I would assume that the push for this comes from the IT crowd, or some enlightened end user/developer, in order to get data under some corporate control. It is surprising therefore that there is no mention of data backups. Excel and access files are more than likely on network drives and so would be backed up periodically. Bundling multiple htmldb workspaces together might provide different challenges with respect to backup and recovery regimes.
I was not enlightened by the chapters in the Website and Application Examples section. Certainly not why I bought the book. Besides, harking back to the beginner and intermediate target audience, these examples are too complex in design. Furthermore, I half expected the source to be available so that the code could at least be examined in order to see how the design details were actually implemented. Perhaps this is more marketing than substance; though not as direct marketing as in the section on PL/SQL Error Handling.
OK, maybe I should admit that my negativity may have something to do with the fact that I am a DBA and have been using htmldb for almost a month. And that I expected the book to tell me what I now know about how to approach htmldb developments and to fill in the gaps where I am still grasping for elegant/generic solutions. It doesn't do either.
There are some good sections in the book. The sections on templates for example; though changing templates requires a reasonable knowledge of html and css (and javascript) and so is probably more an advanced topic.
If you haven't started with htmldb, application express that is, then find a simple application and some time; install XE; create a schema owner; design the schema and include surrogate PKs populated by triggers as well as defaults, FKs etc; build the tables; create views for the LOVs you need and then create the LOVs; set PICK_DATE_FORMAT_MASK; setup UI Defaults; build an application using 1 level tabs and using "form on table with report" for all tables; well, you might want tabular forms for tables that resolve M-M relationships; read the Issue Tracking tutorial from the oracle website and try out on your new website anything that you find that looks appropriate, useful or interesting; research and fix anything else that needs fixing and add anything that needs adding; get some constructive feedback; determine what the design should have been; re-jig or re-start.
There goes the bandwagon....
To compare APEX (formerly HTMLDB) to .NET is like comparing a ready-made-sandwich to a gourmet meal. One (APEX) is a web-page generator with extensions, the other (.NET) is a bona-fide development environment. To suggest otherwise is at best disingenuous. That said, HTMLDB has a niche. This is the first book available and it is essentially a rehash of the online documentation. It says a lot when the author posts his own review and gives it 5 stars... next..
