I went to an online bookstore recently, typed PL/SQL in the Search box, and got38 results back, excluding this book. Thirty-eight books! As far as I could see,none of them was listed alongside the Harry Potter books as worldwide top-sell-ers, so what on earth would inspire a group of authors to come together toproduce the thirty-ninth book on this topic? The reason is that, despite the plethora of available books, we still encounter a great deal of poor quality or antiquated PL/SQL code in Oracle applications.From a personal perspective, I’ve worked with Oracle systems around the world,and although the applications, architectures, and methodologies have been verydiverse, I’ve found two common themes in almost all of these systems. Eitherthey steer away from Oracle-specific functionality altogether, or they use it in ahaphazard and less-than-optimal fashion. Nowhere is this more evident than inthe use of PL/SQL, which has been less “used” and more “abused” in many of thesystems that I’ve encountered. At least part of the problem is that the majority of PL/SQL books are only about syntax. They’ll show you how to code PL/SQL so that it will compile andexecute on your systems (some books extend themselves to giving guidelines forgood naming standards and coding structure). But, as with any programminglanguage, there’s a big difference between just using the language and using itwell. The key to building successful applications is the ability to take your syntaxknowledge and apply it intelligently to build programs that are robust, efficient,and easily maintained. This is the motivation for our book and its title. We don’twant to make you a PL/SQL programmer—we want to make you a smart PL/SQLprogrammer.