content: Although I appreciate the amount of effort required to write a book, I simply can not recommend this one. The book describes unimportant or familiar concepts (like the traditional relational model) in too much detail and new or important concepts (like the Oracle8 object extension syntax) in not enough detail. Many of the diagrams do not appear to relate to the topics being discussed and the examples are too few and far between. I felt that the author used terminology inconsistently or at the very least did not define terms adequately. One might argue that the book is about object-oriented design and not about Oracle `syntax' but if you want to learn about OO check-out books by Booch, Jacobson, Fowler, Rumbaugh, Wirfs-Brock, etc. If you want to learn about Oracle objects try "Oracle8 Design Using UML Object Modeling" by Dorsey et. al.