Understanding Oracle APEX 5 Application Development 2nd ed. Edition

A great book to learn how to build APEX applications, without wizards, but from scratch. This non-wizard approach gives a much deeper understanding of the processes involved and how everything fits together. Thank you Mr. Sciore!

Great book. Very detailed. Would highly recommend it.

On the spot. Quickly introduced me in APEX.

Very clear and useful guiedWaiting for the expert addition

So far so good ... time will tell.

Excellent book!!!

The previous version of this book was the key ingredient in my APEX learning strategy and I am currently reading this new version to gain more insight and get up to speed on APEX 5.The biggest challenge I find with APEX is understanding how the various pieces fit together so you can figure out where to look for a particular setting or where to look to track down a bug in your app. This book has what I think is the ideal strategy for helping you up this learning curve:The book starts by helping you wrap your mind around the major elements of an APEX application: pages, regions, and items. The focus of the book is on understanding how these pieces fit together into a logical framework. Which means that as I went through the book I began to build my own mental model of how APEX works. I cannot stress enough how important this is: your SQL code is just a small piece of your application's design and you need to a clear mental model to understand where your code lives, when it runs, and how it interacts with all the other parts of APEX that are defined using its GUI.Another thing I like about the book is the approach to examples. Yes, it is cool to have a book build some really impressive application as you walk through but then it becomes harder to dip into the book at random points to learn specific skills and have the example make as much sense. By using a series of small, ad hoc examples, each section of the book stands alone and you can read through the example to understand the specific thing being explained. The fact that the examples make use of the sample tables that ship with APEX makes it easy to quickly try something out without needing to have followed along an entire process of building an example. (Note: there is one change you need to make in the example, which the author describes in Chapter 1: adding an additional column to the EMP table, and this would be worth doing at the outset.)One other aspect of the book I would like to highlight: while this book assumes no prior knowledge of APEX it does assume you are interested in pushing this tool as far as you can. The book includes some examples of more advanced techniques like the use of dynamic SQL to increase the interactivity of reports. You can easily skip over this stuff to focus on learning the basics, which are presented really clearly, but when you are ready to explore where you can go with APEX this more advanced stuff points the way. I find it quite unusual and welcome to have both these levels available in a book that is just over 300 pages.The result is a very accessible, very readable, and very practical guide to APEX. Highly recommended!Quick aside: as the book itself makes clear, the book is not intended as an introduction to SQL or databases. You should go elsewhere for that. But once you have a basic grasp of SQL and know just a bit of HTML (the very basics) then this is *the* first place I would go to start learning APEX.

Before I briefly discuss the content of the book, the reason I highly recommend this book to those who want to learn APEX is because it has been written by an author who has both a passion for & a track record in teaching database theory to students. This comes out in every page of the book and stimulates the reader. Each chapter can be thought of one of a series of lectures in APEX with loads of useful information all aimed at not just building an application, but at giving you the understanding of the many configuration options within the development environment. It must not be thought of as a simple tutorial containing a set of steps for building an application. While there are some excellent books that use this style, this book encourages deeper understanding & can be used prior to moving on to a more complex tutorial style book. The book is a superb foundation for studying & learning APEX application development.The backbone of the book is an application called The Employee Database which holds HR – type records & provides the reader with a focus for their study & experimentation. Starting off with instruction on how to obtain a free APEX account, the book then discusses & encourages the reader to learn how to create a range of different database front-end features such as input forms, reports & graphs, as well as how to configure them to maximum effect. The coding ability within APEX is exploited to provide real power & all code needed is provided & explained within the book’s covers. To round off, the reader will learn how to implement a security scheme as well as how to avoid some common weaknesses such as cross-code scripting & SQL injection. Not something many other titles cover.In conclusion if you would like a thorough book that forces you to think as you learn rather than just instructs, this is most certainly the book for you.