Great book. I'm learning all kinds of things that turn SQL*Plus from a dinosaur into a useful tool for day-to-day work. I also enjoy the data being a mixture of Ukrainian historical figures, Dickens character(s) and author's family.

My only addition so far would be to tell people how to set your default editor if it isn't already set. This won't be an issue for most people, since Windows systems have this configured as part of their install. But Unix users will have to set this manually or put it into login.sql:

DEFINE _editor='vi'

There is a mention of this in the description of DEFINE, but nothing in the introduction to using the editor, which would leave beginning users of SQL*Plus in UNIX staring at a '?' wondering what to do (you can get rid of the ? with CTRL-D, which I found out by poking around the keyboard on 'all the usual suspects'). There is also no entry in the index which I could find about this.

I expect this book to join the rest of my O'Reilly books on the 'front line' of my computer library, usually open on or next to my desk.

Chris Gait