Oracle PL/SQL Book?

[Kuo]

I took "Database Systems" in college and have been working for two years, dabbling in Oracle SQL periodically, mostly in the form of standalone queries and such. I would rate myself as "intermediate" in that regard.

I've recently been re-assigned to a new project that requires a lot more SQL programming. I've been put in charge of some the development team and have some "real" SQL coding to start doing. I've been looking for a book that I can dedicate my weekend(s) to in order to quickly ramp up my SQL programming knowledge.

Browsing through Amazon, I've seen general recommendations for two books:
http://www.amazon.com/Oracle-Database-10g-SQL-Programming/dp/0072230665/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpi_1 by Scott Urman
and
http://www.amazon.com/Oracle-PL-SQL...=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1279129823&sr=1-3 by Steven Feuerstein

Would either of these books be suggested over another? Or perhaps even a third book that I don't know about.

I have some familiarity with SQL, so I'm not looking for a complete beginners book. But I'm not familiar enough with it to just get a pure reference book without some "teaching".

 

[PTNL]

Just to add to whatever book(s) users recommend, I'll also recommend the SQL Pocket Guide, which has been very useful from my own development.

 

[ameoba]

The O'Reilly book was good enough for me. It focuses more on the procedural aspects - triggers, functions, scripts & stored procedures and whatnot - than the declarative aspects of Oracle. I don't really know what to recommend if you want to get more up to speed on the of the query-side of things, my understanding of SQL is a side-effect of the logic programming/theorem proving stuff I did back in grad school.

I guess, like any computer system, books only do so much for you - you just need to get in there an do it. As long as you have a clear separation of production & development environments, it's not like you're actually going to break anything.

The fun part of learning any new DBMS is finding out the quirks - NULL and the empty string are the same, getting the optimizer to properly execute tricky queries can involve some serious voodoo, error messages can be painfully obscure. It's a good system, as long as somebody else can afford the licensing.