1Z0-052 Oracle DBA Admin 1 OCA Study Guide by Matthew Morris: Review

articles: 

Matthew Morris (who makes many constructive and knowledgeable contributions to the forum) has written a series of study guides for the OCA/OCP exams. I asked him if I could have a copy of one to review. The result: it's very good. This is a copy of the review I put up on Amazon.

To declare an interest: I was given a review copy of this book.
My qualifications for reviewing are that I passed OCP release 8.0 with upgrades to 11g, also OCM release 10g and upgrade to 11g. And I wrote large parts of the Oracle Press exam guides for 10g and 11g. So I do know a bit about these exams. So does the author, and I have no problem giving as positive a review as I can, and a 5 star rating.
The book is aimed at beginner and intermediate DBAs, who need to formalize their skills through certification. This is an exam guide. It does not attempt to teach you to be a database administrator (you can't do that in 155 pages) nor is it a complete reference. There is no pretence about this: wherever necessary, the author includes references for further study. The guide is perfectly aligned with the exam objectives, as given by Oracle Uni. The objectives are used as section titles, in order. I would say that each section provides information needed to answer all questions that are likely to come up.
As I went through the book, I noted a few errors. No problem, there are always errors in every book. In my opinion, only half a dozen were sufficiently important to be worthy of mention: I passed them back to the author, and they have been fixed.
The book does not include "practice" tests. This is not an issue. The only thing you learn from practice tests is that you can pass a practice test. Real exam questions would be a different matter - but of course that would be illegal.
To conclude, this book is an excellent exam guide. It should be perfect for anyone who has been working in database admin for a while and needs a summary of all the required knowledge, also for DBA students to use as a secondary source to supplement (and validate) their tuition. And you can't argue with the price.
Here's the URL,
http://www.amazon.com/Study-Guide-1Z0-052-Administration-Certification/dp/1477565876