OCP Oracle Database 11g: New Features for Administrators Exam Guide (Exam 1Z0-050): OCP Oracle Database 11g: New Features for Administrators Exam Guide (Exam 1Z0-XXX) (Osborne ORACLE Press Series),   ISBN:9780071496827

Customer Rating: 

I had read this authors (Sam Alapati) new features guide on Oracle 10g, and it had helped me a great deal with my OCP certification.
The 11g new features guide on the other hand falls short on expectations. As some previous reviewers have stated, the book can be best described as inaccurate. I was lucky to have taken the 11g new features class shortly after, where I was able to validate some of the inaccuracies in the book.

Customer Rating: 

I found that this book did serve the purpose - I did pass the test. There are a few typo's, but as a experienced DBA, I was able to spot them. The author did an adaquit job in covering all of the required subject matter for the test. As with any professional certification test, it is important to use many resources to prepare.

Customer Rating: 

If you don't feel like scouring through the volumes of useless information in the Oracle documentation, this book can be a guide to keep you focused. That's all. You'll need to verify just about everything said in this book due to the ridiculous amount of inaccuracy. That being said, you still can learn quite a bit in the end with the additional verification work. By itself, this book is nearly useless though.

Make sure to check out this Errata link and print it out before reading. I didn't have this last year when I bought the book, but it hopefully reduces some of the mistakes you'll encounter. Also, Keep a red pen handy like I do! (The book needs bigger margins...)

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PLEASE, McGraw-Hill, try to do some sort of proofreading in the future! This is a technical book, and needs to be ACCURATE! After I bought the Alapati 10g Exam guide, I would have bought from any other publisher if I had a choice! This book reinforces my opinion.

Customer Rating: 

Looking at all the other reviews, it appears pretty unanimous-- the book is so FULL of errors it's almost unreadable!!! I'm on chapter 7 and it doesn't get any better. I read Sam's "Expert Oracle 9i Database Administration" a few years ago, and it had some errors, but was quite good overall. Somebody was asleep at the wheel on this one!

Customer Rating: 

The book is organized fairly well. I haven't taken the test yet, but the content seems structured around what is on the test. However, I agree with the other reviews. Typos abound in this book. There are extra spaces and missing letters. The examples have extra semicolons, parens, and other mistakes. There are a couple of cases where whole paragraphs are repeated in different subsections. The summary sections often contradict the earlier sections of the chapter. Many of the chapter questions are poorly worded and the answers contradict earlier sections in the chapter.

In summary, the book is useful if you use the oracle documentation to validate its assertions. It is amazing that a book this poorly edited is released for publication. Unfortunately, I haven't seen any other source that is organized for the test as well as this book, so I marginally recommend it.