In this book, Steven Feuerstein, widely recognized as one of the world's experts on the Oracle PL/SQL language, distills his many years of programming, writing, and teaching about PL/SQL into a set of PL/SQL language "best practices"--rules for writing code that is readable, maintainable, and efficient. Too often, developers focus on simply writing programs that run without errors--and ignore the impact of poorly written code upon both system performance and their ability (and their colleagues' ability) to maintain that code over time. br/br/Oracle PL/SQL Best Practices is a concise, easy-to-use reference to Feuerstein's recommendations for excellent PL/SQL coding. It answers the kinds of questions PL/SQL developers most frequently ask about their code: bulletlistHow should I format my code?/bullet What naming conventions, if any, should I use?/bullet How can I write my packages so they can be more easily maintained?/bullet What is the most efficient way to query information from the database?/bullet How can I get all the developers on my team to handle errors the same way?/bullet /bulletlistbr/br/The book contains 120 best practices, divided by topic area. It's full of advice on the program development process, coding style, writing SQL in PL/SQL, data structures, control structures, exception handling, program and package construction, and built-in packages. It also contains a handy, pull-out quick reference card. As a helpful supplement to the text, code examples demonstrating each of the best practices are available on the O'Reilly web site. br/br/Oracle PL/SQL Best Practices is intended as a companion to O'Reilly's larger Oracle PL/SQL books. It's a compact, readable reference that you'll turn to again and again--a book that no serious developer can afford to be without.