Rating: 
Summary: Buy Exam Cram First
Review: On p. 55 the book has a review question that says: "The data store in the V$ views are generally lowercase." I find this claim to be wrong. I looked at the V$ views of our company database and I found about half of the contents are in either upper case or upper-case initialized.I still find this book to be a valuable learning tool for DBA exams. It covers about all the basic requirements of the exams. It does not have deep ideas and reasonings, but as DBA you probably don't need too much reasoning anyway. My advise: buy the exam cram books first. They are very good. If you still cann't do it after reading the exam cram books, then buy this book. If you have trouble with Oracle/Database concepts, then I would suggest you also buy the Jason Couchman book (Oracle8 DBA Certification Exam Guide) before you buy this book.
Rating: 
Summary: the whole is fine but week on performance tuning
Review: the set of book is fine and easy to read, but the performance tuning part is week, don't rely on it to pass the exam. but the other part is good.
Rating: 
Summary: Good reading
Review: This book focuses on the requirements for the exam. It is also a good introduction to both Networking and Perf Tuning. Use along with Exam Cram for best results.
Rating:
Summary: Passed the Networking Administration Exam
Review: With 17 days of studying, I passed the network administration exam scoring 44 out of 59 questions(I thought that I would have scored better). First, I studied the Oracle8 Instructor Lead Training (ILT) course material and then studied this book making my own flashcards to help with the memorization of the material. This book was easy to understand and explained the concepts very well. When using the Self Test Software tests, this book was used as the reference because of the better explanations. The chapter tests along with the explanation of the answers helped solidify the chapter's concepts. Chapter 20, a summary of the 8i enhancements, is on the CD and was hard to read and really desired a hard copy of the text but the print button was disabled. When taking bonus exam two on the CD, write down each answer on paper and press the answer button after each question to keep a manual running score. Somehow, my test skipped question 50 and when the test was scored, it used a different set of answers. All in all, it is a very good study guide. W. C. Feurtado, MCSE, MCDBA, and OCP-DBA wannabe (3 down, 2 to go)
Rating:
Summary: Good Book - Bad CD
Review: You can pass your exams if you rely only on this book, but you won't have a comfortable margin. The performance tuning section is the stronger of the section, and would give it 5 stars. I didn't find errors, and did pass the performance tuning exam with 58 out of 59. The network section is why I gave the book an overall rating of three stars. There are errors (like explaining how to use connection pooling with connection concentration), typos, wrong commands, obvious -if- you knew the material. If you didn't know the material, the errors were confusing. There were also errors in the test sections. One or two errors may not seem like a big deal unless it's the difference between passing the test or not. I got the impression that the person who wrote the networking section didn't really know the nuts and bolts of networking. For networking I'd recommend The Exam Cram Book; accurate, to the point, easy to understand, written by someone who knew her stuff. I passed the networking exam, 55 out of 59, but reading the Exam Cram and reviewing the Oracle documentation would have been sufficient.
Rating:
Summary: Good but not great
Review: You can pass your exams if you rely only on this book, but you won't have a comfortable margin. The performance tuning section is the stronger of the section, and would give it 5 stars. I didn't find errors, and did pass the performance tuning exam with 58 out of 59. The network section is why I gave the book an overall rating of three stars. There are errors (like explaining how to use connection pooling with connection concentration), typos, wrong commands, obvious -if- you knew the material. If you didn't know the material, the errors were confusing. There were also errors in the test sections. One or two errors may not seem like a big deal unless it's the difference between passing the test or not. I got the impression that the person who wrote the networking section didn't really know the nuts and bolts of networking. For networking I'd recommend The Exam Cram Book; accurate, to the point, easy to understand, written by someone who knew her stuff. I passed the networking exam, 55 out of 59, but reading the Exam Cram and reviewing the Oracle documentation would have been sufficient.
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