This is my first opportunity to be on the inside of an Internet startup. It is a simultaneously surreal and gritty experience. Everything has to be done in "e time" (yesterday). Each new day, a dozen new business opportunities and corresponding technology challenges appear on our plate.

On the other hand, we have assembled a very strong core group of about 75 IT professionals. We are using Oracle8i right from the get-go, plus Enterprise Java Beans. We have a very solid business model based on actual revenue instead of projected losses. How cool!

I wrote Oracle Web Applications: PL/SQL Developer's Introduction to help these busy people start making the transition to 8i. Most of us just don't have the time or the energy to read--much less carry around-- some five-pound book. My goal was to write a short book--one that you could read over the weekend or on the train home from work--that covered the critical 20% of material used 80% of the time. It's my hope that the reader who starts at ground level will be able to develop pretty sophisticated PL/SQL-based Web applications in just a week or two.

Of course, at a more global level, one big challenge for Oracle (PL/SQL) developers is the need to learn Java. To become a Java guru could take years, especially if object-oriented programming is new to you. You can, on the other hand, fairly rapidly understand the basic concepts and capabilities of the language, and then put those to use in your environment.

Plus, Java is case sensitive! I can't tell you how may times I've screamed at my computer after spending ten minutes looking for a compiler error only to discover that I've typed RetVal instead of retVal. On a higher level, there's lots of academic jargon. Polymorphism? Multiple Inheritance? It can be intimidating.

Still, from my brief flirtations with Java, I think database people are in a pretty good position. The hardest thing I've found is learning how to apply object-oriented data modeling principles. Once I got past the nomenclature, though, I found it surprisingly similar to database normalization (speaking of academic terms!). If you know how to normalize a set of tables and understand and use PL/SQL packages, you're well on your way to understanding Java. You just have to remember to apply what you already know.

When I've talked about this book with developers at various seminars, they have responded enthusiastically, so I am looking forward to getting it finished and out the door. I have had help on this book from many developers, especially Darryl Hurley. The workbook was about 80% complete at the end of 1999, but when I realized that I simply didn't have the time to finish the last 20% I asked Andrew to join me. He agreed, and he is now very hard at work turning all this great content into finished form. Thanks, Andrew! (And of course thanks to Debby Russell, my editor of five years.)

So I am busy integrating this new information into all my content areas, including the outstanding RevealNet Knowledge Bases (which, by the way, you can now order directly from O'Reilly!), and then I plan to help developers and DBAs come up to speed and apply the technology.