Rating: 

Another O'Reilly win.

Several minor complaints:

o For a book published half-year after 9i release, this one contains very little 9i-updated information. Inline notes on 9i improvements would have been very helpful (eg, "PreparedStatement cannot write LOBs with OCI driver" doesn't appear to be true in 9i; a more egregious fault is stating that Oracle doesn't have a TIMESTAMP SQL datatype, on p432).

o Ch18, "Detection and Locking", has nothing to do with JDBC. It presents a tediously reasoned solution to a non-problem.