Why Read This Book? When you opened the cover of this book, you had a notion of what you would find. With a title like Beginning Oracle Programming, it's fairly obvious what this book is all about. Simply put, the purpose of this book is to teach you how to manage data using an Oracle database. The goal of Beginning Oracle Programming is to introduce you to those concepts that are important to understand as a beginning-level Oracle user. You are setting out on the same journey we traveled some years ago. We know the things you are going to run into time and time again. We understand the challenges you are going to meet when you have to develop an application or administer your database. We can guarantee you that the techniques you'll learn in this book are proven and have led us through many successful implementations. So instead of talking about the things we want to teach you in an abstract kind of way, let's talk specifics.