It has been a busy 12 month. In addition to the day jobs, I've also been busy writing. (More news on this in a couple of weeks!)
Today is a major milestone as my second book is officially released and available in print and ebook formats.
The tile of the book is 'Real Word SQL and PL/SQL: Advice from the Experts'. Check it out on Amazon.
Now that sounds like a very fancy title, but it isn't meant to be. This book is written by 5 people (including me), who are all Oracle ACE Directors, who all have 20+ years of experience, each, of working with the Oracle Database, and we all love sharing our knowledge. My co-authors are Arup Nanda, Heli Helskyaho, Martin Widlake and Alex Nuitjen. It was a pleasure working with you.
I haven't seen a physical copy of the book yet !!! Yes the book is released and I haven't held it in my hands. Although I have seen pictures of it that other people have taken. There was a delay in sending out the author copies of the book, but as of this morning my books are sitting in Stansted Airport and should be making their way to Ireland today. So fingers crossed I'll have them tomorrow. I'll update this blog post with a picture when I have them. UPDATE: They finally arrived at 13:25 on the 22nd August.
In addition to the 5 authors we also had Chet Justice (Oraclenerd), and Oracle ACE Director, as the technical editor. We also had Tim Hall, Oracle ACE Director, wrote a foreword for us.
To give you some background to the book and why we wrote it, here is an extract from the start of the book, where I describe how the idea for this book came about and the aim of the book.
"While attempting to give you an idea into our original thinking behind the need for this book and why we wanted to write it, . the words of Rod Stewart’s song ‘Sailing’ keeps popping into my mind. These are ‘We are sailing, we are sailing, home again 'cross the sea’. This is because the idea for this book was born on a boat. Some call it a ship. Some call it a cruise ship. Whatever you want to call it, this book was born at the OUG Norway conference in March 2015. What makes the OUG Norway conference special is that it is held on a cruise ship that goes between Oslo in Norway to Kiel in Germany and back again. This means as a speaker and conference attendee you are ‘trapped’ on the cruise ship for 2 days filled with presentations, workshops, discussions and idea sharing for the Oracle community.
It was during this conference that Heli and Brendan got talking about their books. Heli had just published her Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler book and Brendan had published his book on Oracle Data Miner the previous year. Whilst they were discussing their experiences of writing and sharing their knowledge and how much they enjoyed this,they both recognized that there are a lot of books for the people starting out in their Oracle career and then there are lots of books on specialized topics. What was missing were books that covered the middle group. A question they kept on asking but struggled to answer was, ‘after reading the introductory books, what book would they read next before getting onto the specialized books?’ This was particularly true of SQL and PL/SQL.
They also felt that something that was missing from many books, especially introductory ones, was the “Why and How” of doing things in certain ways that comes from experience. It is all well and good knowing the syntax of commands and the options, but what takes people from understanding a language to being productive in using it is that real-world derived knowledge that comes from using it for real tasks. It would be great to share some of that experience.
Then over breakfast on the final day of the OUG Norway conference, as the cruise ship was sailing through the fjorrd and around the islands that lead back to Oslo, Heli and Brendan finally agreed that this book should happen. They then listed the type of content they thought would be in such a book and who are the recognized experts (or super heroes) for these topics. This list of experts was very easy to come up with and the writing team of Oracle ACE Directors was formed, consisting of Arup Nanda, Martin Widlake and Alex Nuijten, along with Heli Helskyaho and Brendan Tierney. The author team then got to work defining the chapters and their contents. Using their combined 120+ years of SQL and PL/SQL experience they finally came up with scope and content for the book at Oracle Open World.
..."
As you can see, this book was 17 months in the making. This consisted of 4 months of proposal writing, research and refinement, 8 months of writing, 3 months of editing and 2 months for production of book.
Yes it takes a lot of time and commitment. We all finished our last tasks and final edits on the book back in early June. Since then the book has been sent for printing, converted into an ebook, books shipped to Oracle Press warehouse, then shipped to Amazon and other book sellers. Today it is finally available officially.
(when I say officially, it seems that Amazon has shipped some pre-ordered books a week ago)
If you are at Oracle Open World (OOW) in September make sure to check out the book in the Oracle Book Store, and if you buy a copy try to track us down to get us to sign it. The best way to do this is to contact us on Twitter, leave a message at the Oracle Press stand, or you will find us hanging out at the OTN Lounge.
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