Oracle APEX 4.0 Cookbook

Thanks to some recent train travel, I had a chance to catch up on some reading, and so I looked at the recently published Oracle APEX 4.0 Cookbook by Michel van Zoest and Marcel van der Plas. It's great to see more and more APEX books coming out, and of course there are already several excellent ones out there. This new one I found quite interesting due to the way it's been structured. The authors basically have chapters covering the main areas of interest, i.e. creating basic applications, themes, websheets, web serivces, APIs, etc. And then within each chapter, they have smaller sections that lay out, step by step, how to go about e.g. creating a form, creating a report, creating a theme, etc, all broken down into very manageable pieces. And in each section, they tell you what you need to get started, then walk you through the steps, and then provide some background info on how it all works. So I think this is the kind of book an APEX developer might put on his desk (or e-reader) to quickly look up specific features while they are developing their applications. I think this book provides a great value to both experienced APEX developers and developers who just recently got started. It's not necessarily targeted towards complete beginners though, i.e. it's not so much an introduction into APEX as the authors pretty quickly get into more advanced features, like APIs, AJAX, JavaScript, etc. So for anyone looking for an APEX book they can use to quickly look up certain features, and how to use them, this book is doing an excellent job.