Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com

Application Express, or APEX, is one of the most innovative products to come out of Oracle in years. APEX is an application development framework for developing database–backed applications. It’s easy enough to get started in that power users can quit storing data in random spreadsheets and instead centralize their data in the powerful Oracle database, all without developer help. Developers arent left out, however. Those who choose to can go deep and leverage the full power and flexibility of Oracles database engine.

Getting started with APEX is easy. Learning how to take full advantage of APEX is the problem. It was the problem, that is, until this book came along. In Pro Oracle Application Express, authors John Scott and Scott Spendolini open the “hood” of APEX and expose the full power behind its easy–to–use GUI interface. They show you what you need to know to produce powerful, professionally polished applications, things such as user-authentication models, approaches to layout and navigation, how to integrate Ajax, how to deal with localization issues such as time zones and translations, how to customize the look and feel of an APEX web site, and much, much more.

The authors are well–qualified to write on APEX. John Scott runs ShellPrompt, a hosting service that handles many large-scale APEX applications, some of which he is paid to develop. John is a hard–core APEX developer. His coauthor, Scott Spendolini, is one of the original creators of APEX. Both John and Scott now base their fulltime careers on developing APEX applications. Pro Oracle APEX is your opportunity to learn APEX from the very best.

Average Customer Rating:

Great book for non-experts

Customer Rating:

Being quite new to APEX and PL/SQL, I was anxious to find a book that would actually provide me with useful methods for implementing improvements to my APEX application. This book does that. After reading the chapters on Authentication and Authorization, I was able to implement my own authentication and authorization schemes in my app. This book is great for those developers who are not yet experts in APEX and who may not yet feel totally comfortable with all of its capabilities.

Great introduction to APEX

Customer Rating:

I'm now making my second pass through this book in more detail but I have found this book to meet my needs perfectly by providing a very comprehensive overview of what can be done with APEX. If you are thinking about developing a product with APEX or adding an APEX component to your current architecture then this is a great place to start. More details are provided as you get further and further into the design and development process. I was disappointed to find that the sample code was not made available unless I purchase the sister e-book for $10.

So that's how you do that

Customer Rating:

I am an intermediate user of Apex but always wanted to do something more impressive in my reports and layouts. I also never liked the way I handled the LDAP. This book made the LDAP authenication a lot clearer to do and also has some great tips on reports that jump out at you. I also didn't use a lot of the HTML features just because I didn't know how but this book also brought a lot to light in that area. This book is a good buy for someone with a basic knowledge of APEX looking for some of those answers they just never get to in the classes.

The Best ApEx Book Available

Customer Rating:

Oracle's Application Express (aka ApEx, formerly HTMLDB) is an amazing foundation for developing database-driven web applications. It is easy for a novice, yet very flexible for a software developer. Unfortunately, there have not been any good references published until now. Scott and Spendolini have created a wonderful reference and tutorial that surpasses anything else out there. The chapters on Ajax and JavaScript and the APEX Dictionary were extremely helpful to me as a developer. I was disappointed that there was no section on validation. Overall, it was excellent, and if I could give 4.5 stars, I would. Tom Hubbard Software Developer