First question is: What are the best books on Oracle? - with emphasis being mostly from the application development angle. I went to the half-priced bookstore over the weekend and managed to snag a couple of O'Reilly titles real cheap: [link|http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/orsqplus/|Oracle SQL*Plus] and [link|http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/oraclep2/|Oracle PL/SQL Programming, 2nd Edition]. Both of them are a version behind (8i), though Ora don't have a new edition yet for SQL*Plus."Oracle PL/SQL Best Practices", from the same author as "Oracle PL/SQL Programming".
Second question is: in learning Oracle, do I really need to pay top dollar for that 9i edition, or will the much more reasonably priced 8i books do the trick? The two books I bought were $6 each. Much nicer than the $40 to $50 one must pay for the 9i insignia. But then if 9i is really significantly different, am i wasting my money buying 8i books?9i doesn't seem terribly different to me. There are some additions to the object stuff (inheritance, mainly).
Finally, I'm about 2/3rds of the way through the SQL*Plus book and have downloaded the Personal edition of Oracle 9i off the internet. Although SQL*Plus seems easy enuf to master, it definitely feels cheezy in lots of different ways (I dislike having yet another programming language stacked on top of a programming language). Last question then concerns what the best multiplatform solution is for a simple interface to conduct queries and compile stored procedures?[link|http://www.globecom.se/tora/|TOra].
HTH.