Thursday, January 30, 2014

Favorite stories: how programmers benefited from my book(s)

I received this very pleasant note today from a PL/SQL developer:
Actually, the second edition of PL/SQL programming is what jump started my career as a PL/SQL developer. I was sold to my first Oracle customer as an Oracle developer, while I had actually never written any PL/SQL. So I raced to the biggest bookstore in Rotterdam and guess what I found [Steven: the biggest computer book he ever saw? :-) ]. The sad thing is these kind of books cannot be found in physical book stores anymore.  For years I used to visit Barnes & Nobles in WPB and pick up an Oracle book when on holiday. Every year the computer book section would occupy less space, and would recently only offer books on iPhone programming, Excel for dummies and such. This year I didn't even bother. Even my favorite bookstore of all times, Computer Book Centre in Funan Centre Singapore is now on line only.
Wow, his favorite bookstore is in Singapore. I like that!

I sure enjoyed my time in Singapore, though bookstores didn't figure much into the visits....

I have to say that I've never been overly concerned about how my books might help a corporation improve its bottom line. But I have always felt very satisfied when I hear how my books may have helped an individual's career.

Oh, this Dutch developer also shared with me his orange bookstack:


3 comments:

Tanmoy said...

Hi Steve, On this context, I loved your developer workbook. Do you have any plan for new edition.

Thanks
Tanmoy

Steven Feuerstein said...

Thanks, Tanmoy. I have no plans for a new edition, largely because I have instead created a whole website full of way more and better quizzes: plsqlchallenge.com.

iudith said...

Hello Steven,

Actually, the first of your books that I encountered and still enjoy A LOT to read was "Oracle Built-In Packages".
I like very much that approach and style of supplying very detailed explanations and examples for a feature.

As Oracle added so many packages in each version, I think that another edition of such a book,
presenting a selection of the evailable pacakges which are likely to be the most useful for developers,
but still doing this at the same level of detail would be most welcome.

The Oracle documentation itself does contain very few examples for most these fatures, if at all,
if we compare it with the older versions.

For me it is always a pleasure to remember those good old times, when I was reading a lot of printed books,
both Oracle documentation and others, and when time was not running around us at such a devastating pace
as it does today ...

Cheers,
Iudith