Ever since I first heard of (and pre-ordered!) this book,
I've been anxiously awaiting its arrival.
I received it a few days ago and wondered where all the Perl is.
At first glance, I was disappointed that the book does not begin with an
introduction to perl. After all, this book is titled 'Perl for Oracle DBA's' and not '3rd Party Perl Applications for Oracle DBAs.' The Perl language has been relegated to an Appendex in the book.
To add further disappointment, I am having difficulty getting examples in the
book to run properly.
The first pitfall (thankfully the first example of connecting with DBD::Oracle
worked!) was the example on page 69-70. There is no code in step 5. After
trying the next example, I was fortunate enough to realize that it was missing a
simple MainLoop();. Not too bad but we're only on the second code example in
the book.
The next script, WhatIsTheTime.pl (Page 71) wouldn't run until I removed the use
strict line-it complained about the line 'my oracleTime;'. I dont remember the
reason, but after much frustration and experimentation, I got it to work.
Finally nothing that I (or my co-workers) could do would get Oracle_objects.pl
(Page 116-117) to run. Being a Perl rookie, I couldn't figure out why the chart
wouldn't come up in my browser. However, in the DDL/DML that allegedly
populates the table for bar chart, you create a table called bars with two
fields (object_type and object_count), but select barchart from the table, and
filter bars by WIDTH, HEIGHT, 3-D, X-ORIENT, and TITLE.
For my $44.95, it's not unreasonable to expect working examples of such a
promising technology.
I'm only on page 130 of the book but I am incredibly disappointed. I was
looking for an excellent perl tutorial/companion for Oracle DBAs in the same
vein as the excellent 'Unix for Oracle DBAs Pocket Reference'. Hopefully a revised version will be release soon, at no cost.
Neil Kodner
Salt Lake City, UT
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