Comments on: Book content

By: Ben Prusinski

Ben Prusinski — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 02:38:20 +0000

As an author of a few Oracle books, I agree- we need to preface the works with a caveat emptor. Of course, as an author, I do my best to test the exercises to ensure
accuracy for content as well as to do research with sources to back up the content of the technical materials. One thing that upsets me is that many books on Oracle and database technology fail to credit sources for many technical items. I do my best to reference materials for additional information so that the reader can obtain value from the work.

By: Jonathan Lewis

Jonathan Lewis — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 19:32:39 +0000

JulesLt,

I’ve just had a quick look – and the idea of marking topics up or down looks like a good one. There are opportunities for abuse, of course, and it suffers from the usual problem that there are lots of people who don’t know what they don’t know and therefore think an “easy” answer is a good answer. Abuse or ignorance (which is the more important problem) could easily result in bad answers being promoted. I also found it quite hard to navigate to things I might be interested in – and that’s a problem that could grow as the volume increases.

By: mwidlake

mwidlake — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 18:54:29 +0000

No author can be expected to get it 100% right 100% of the time, be it a book, an article, a web site, a presentation or a blog, but I think there is more of a duty to your potential readers to be more rigorous as you go up the scale of permanence (from blog to book). There is also an expectation that a published tomb that you pay for is of good quality. I wonder if you could take back a technical book with serious errors and demand your money back as it is not “fit for purpose” under the sales of goods and services acts (UK laws). Mind you, I still have an Oracle Press book from V7 days that I keep as it was so bad.

A big problem is that 99% of people are just too busy to check and question the advice they come across. Yes, they should question, but when you are stuck and you come across a potential solution, most people will just take it. It’s how the Oracle Myths stay alive. If advice is repeated, most people will accept it as truth.

After a while I guess we learn who we can rely on for advice and to always favour those who back up their assertions with evidence, like you do Jonathan, and avoid those who don’t, like a certain popular American expert.

And that leads me on to why I think people can get away with poor advice. Most of us are averse to specifically pointing the finger at someone, especially in print or on the web. I will discuss my misgivings about some experts with friends, I’ll mention some during presentations, but I won’t write it down. I’m just too weak!

By: Martin "Usn" Klier

Martin "Usn" Klier — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 15:01:52 +0000

I agree – books are there to learn from them. One has to accept the right of the author to slip up, but there’s something like moral commitment to prevent the “students” from being avoidable mislead or talked into doing plain nonsense. The web is full of bugs caused by guess-and-shout (just look for chr() as second argument for sys_connect_by_path() on the search engine of your choice), so books should protect their good name as reliable in a better way – as well as the authors!

Regards
Martin Klier

By: JulesLt

JulesLt — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 11:10:49 +0000

I like the solution Stack Overflow has take with regards technical matters – however, the danger in this approach is that popular myths (or more commonly, things which were once true) can still be rated as correct.

By: Mathias Magnuson

Mathias Magnuson — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 06:31:44 +0000

I agree 100%. I read the same thread and skipped the debate as I found the discussion be more about people explaining how they would not be hurt as they always question authority. It may feel good to say, but it is much harder to do. That is especially true when it comes to books for beginners in an area. Another reason I do not like that response is that I seldom pay good money to get books that are wrong just so I can practice critical thinking.

I wish books were rated by people similar to how music and movies often are on sites like rotten tomatoes. There are books I treasure and there are books I regret buying. After a while you end up buying books based on the authors more than on the back cover. The problem is more that the best authors in the Oracle world doesn’t publish often enough (hint, hint… :-) )