Oracle Academy Textbooks Oracle Database Tips by Donald Burleson

Oracle Academy is making great inroads into High Schools, Community Colleges and Universities across the USA.  As the presence of Oracle Academy increases, professors are beginning to adopt Oracle over the traditional MS-Access database.

Over the past 25 years I've taught over 100 information systems courses, primarily in business school IT programs for MBA's.  I've taught at the University of New Mexico, Webster University, State Universities of New York (SUNY) and the Rochester Institute of Technology.

The existing Oracle Academy are focused solely on the application of Oracle, but the professor must incorporate the Oracle exercises into their academic curriculum.  For example, a teacher of survey IT courses, might incorporate Oracle as part of a project on the design and implementation of an online system.

In the more advanced AACSB business school IT courses, Oracle is a great alternative to traditional tools.  Oracle with Apex (Application Express, HTML-DB) provides a great free-of-charge vehicle for illustrating concepts in many academic studies, from elementary logic to advanced computer science.  Schools and Universities are also addressing a practical mandate.  Students demand an educational experience that applies to real-world situations, an academic learning experience with a pragmatic approach that teaches real-world skills.  With the increasing demand for qualified Oracle professionals, schools across the globe are applying Oracle examples for courses is many disciplines:

• High School
   
  • Math and Calculus can be made interesting with real-world applications in PL/SQL
  • Applied Logic classes - Oracle PL/SQL is a great way to introduce Boolean logic.
  • Business Administration classes can require a web-enabled web site
     
• Community College
   
  • Information Technology
  • Computer technician
     
• Undergraduate studies
   
  • Computer Science
  • Information Systems
     
• Graduate Studies
   
  • Computer Science
  • Information Systems

Let's take a close look at how Oracle can be incorporated into legitimate academic studies.

Undergraduate Courses for Oracle Academy

There are dozens of opportunities for deploying Oracle technology in the university setting, and using Oracle for working examples of legitimate academic areas in Information Systems and Computer Science:

Introduction to Information Systems

This is normally a 300-level (junior) business school course with an elementary computer literacy course prerequisite.

Data Structures

Instead of the old-fashioned use of C in a sterile environment, a educational data structures course can use the Oracle Pro*C precompiler to interface SQL with linked-list data structures.

Books for Oracle Academy Courses

The IT professor is challenged to find textbooks that have legitimate academic applications of Oracle so that Oracle can be used without compromising the academic goals.

There are several "missing" books, books which could incorporate Oracle into the course exercises, improving the quality of the IT or CScurriculum:

Easy Oracle PHP Create Dynamic Web Pages with Oracle Data Mladen Gogala This is an excellent book for deploying interactive web sites using free Oracle XE.

Easy Oracle Jumpstart Oracle Database Management Concepts and Administration Steve Karam This is a great supplemental textbook for any introduction to database management course.

Easy HTML-DB Oracle Application Express Create Dynamic HTML with Apex Michael Cunningham, Kent Crotty This is a superb book for professors who want their students to deploy working online systems, fast and easy.

Oracle Tuning The Definitive Reference Donald K. Burleson This is an excellent academic resource for advanced database management studies.

Easy Oracle SQL Get Started Fast writing SQL Reports with SQL*Plus John Garmany This is a great book for college courses on SQL and it has lots of working examples and a sample database to maximize student learning.

Easy Oracle PL/SQL Programming Get Started Fast with Working PL/SQL Code Examples John Garmany This is a must-have textbook for procedural language programming courses, a plain English treatment of PL/SQL for database programing.