This book is ancient. It was published back in 2004. The funny thing is that most of the information is still relevant today. I checked on Amazon. There seems to be an update to the book from 2013. But it is selling used for $800. WTF?
I went through the introduction section of the book. It had me set up auto trace in my Oracle database instance. Also read up on sql trace and using tkprof. Not bad seeing how I have not even made it to Chapter 1 yet.
The only downside is that the book is made available to me through the Books 24x7 web site. My company has some sort of bulk license with them. The web user interface is painful. I had to go through each page. But the pages do not fit on my screen. So there is a lot of scrolling with their custom controls.
I tried to print out a copy of the book. I have the ability to print to a file. Unfortunately the Books 24x7 site intercepts print requests. All I got in the output was a page with copyright information on it. How useless.
So I went through the whole book, copy and pasting the pages into Word documents, one per chapter. Now I can read in my leisure. I could buy myself a copy from Amazon. New ones go for $19. I can also pick up a used copy there for under $8. Could be a good investment.
