Hughes' biography of Hardee is not unlike its subject: competent, professional, and unspectacular. The focus is appropriately on Hardee's Civil War career. The post-war years receive especially light treatment. Hughes does an excellent job of assessing Hardee's performance during each campaign and battle. To his great credit, he is more inclined than most biographers to be critical of his subject when warranted. Hardee's personality emerges less vividly from the book than we might wish. Perhaps this is due to a lack of insightful source material, or to the fact that Hardee himself lacked the charisma to be an ideal subject. Whatever the reason, you won't find Hardee particularly likeable or loathesome, but you will learn a lot about his role in the Civil War.

The book does not have the in-depth coverage that expert SQL users would expect. If you are a beginner then it may suit you just fine. There are not enough nuts and bolts for people like me who really need the complete reference book.

A very good book on Oracle8 administration, performance tuning, backup and recovery. Full of well organized useful information.

I am primarily a Solaris system admin who wants to learn more about the inside of Oracle and what it takes to keep it up and running. The O'Reilly titles were a major disappointment since most of their stuff usually rocks, but let's hope for better 2nd editions on those along with some good tutorial material. The Oracle Press titles are totally disorganized and a major embarassment! David Austin has put together a great book with Using Oracle 8, and if you have to suffer through NT (and thank God I don't), he has plenty of material on Oracle Enterprise Mgr (all of chapter 4). Then he moves on to the nitty gritty, with a Unix-oriented or at least generic "pure Oracle" approach. I have spent two weeks browsing and reading various Oracle books and good choices are hard to find. I strongly recommend Alomari's "Oracle8 and Unix Performance Tuning" as well.