object databases

I used this book while I was attending a class in database systems. After some 100-150 pages I simply stopped reading it. The author is to much into using academic mombo-jombo talk, that just trying to understand one simple line sometimes seems impossible. After some time the lessons got to the point in the book where I had given up and after the teacher explained it, I was thinking "Was that it?". The author needs to realise that it is a LEARNING book he is trying to write, not a "look, im smarter than you" book. I'd pretty much recomend ANYTHING other than this book....its useless in my opinion.

The book relies heavily on explaining concepts through the examples outlined. So heavily, in fact, that trying to understand a single concept is almost impossible without reading the book as a whole.
To use it, you kind of have to read it cover to cover--novel style. This is rarely a useful way to approach technical learning, and other books do much better with alternate approaches.

I took this course from Dr. Riccardi himself at FSU. To be fair, the book was still in the development stage when I had his class. However, I found that the examples in the book never quite communicated the idea he was attempting to communicate. The examples were not simple enough, and very often showed multiple concepts which tended to take away from the effectiveness of the example.

The book is also a bit confusing. There are a lot of terms that have been carefully defined, however, similar sounding terms have a completely different connotation.

Although Java is not a stated prerequisite to this course, I would recommend having Java either before taking the class or during the same semester. Later in the book there are some assignments in Java. The author expected the class to be comfortable with reading and modifying Java source code.