I have reviewed the latest edition of Oracle PL/SQL Programming. This is not a book, at least for me, that I would read front to back. I use it mostly as a reference, but the great thing about this book is that you can also use this book to learn programming PL/SQL from scratch.

The book is nicely ordered into different parts, like Program structure and how to use SQL in PL/SQL (which by the way to should minimize as much as possible).  Besides all the information on how to use the PL/SQL language, there are also reference parts with for instance the Metacharacters for Regular Expressions or the number format models. Something you will probably not learn by heart if you don’t use it regularly.

Although Oracle release 12.1 doesn’t bring major changes to the PL/SQL language, there are some areas where it has been changed and improved. This doesn’t mean by the way this book shouldn’t be used when you are running an older version of Oracle. It is an invaluable reference when you are programming for Oracle version 11 or even 10. Even though Oracle doesn’t support the older versions anymore, you can still use some of the techniques in this book. Maybe you’ll learn about possibilities that you cannot use yet, because of the version you are on, but it may give you an idea on how to implement it anyway or information on why you should upgrade to a newer version. If you database supports Conditional Compilation (Page 1064) which is available since version 10G Release 2 you could already start implementing the new techniques and if your organization upgrades to a newer version you will use it right away. For instance the Function Result Cache (Pages 853 – 868) would be a great candidate for this.

This is a rather big book (one of the biggest I have on this subject), but it’s also one of the best. A good way to get your work done is know stuff is possible and find out the details when you want to use it. Even though I have been working with the language for more than 14 years, there a still some areas where I need to get the extra information and that’s where this book comes is really handy.