Folks:
Here's yet another updated tutorial. I've been hosting an Oracle SQL*Plus tutorial for the last 16 or 17 years or so (wow that's a long time!). This was one of the very first tutorials I put on the web back in 1996 and it has been downloaded thousands of times. From my web site statistics I can see it was downloaded over 9,000 times in the last month.
Since I took a bit of a break in teaching the advanced database course, I have not kept the tutorial up to date. So this week I set about to fix that. The main modifications I made were to include more references to the current oracle 11g Release 2 software that most folks would come across if they are going to do a new install of Oracle today.
To that end, I have included an extra page on how to download and install Oracle 11g Release 2 Express Edition. I also included some notes on using Oracle Application Express to submit SQL statements directly to the database. Oracle Application Express is a web app. that loads up along side of the database. It provides a basic web server that serves up different screens that let you build web applications and work directly with the database. This makes it very easy to get started doing interesting things with the Oracle database.
The good news is that virtually all of the SQL statements that I provide in my SQL tutorial work just fine under even the most recent version of the database.
The other MAJOR update I did was to the actual data examples used in the tutorial. The original tutorial was based on a data set from a well known textbook. The data set used birth dates and social security numbers for employees, managers, etc. I've replaced all references to social security number to employeeid. This is to encourage better practice of not using ssn at all if you can avoid it. The employees were starting to look a little old so I updated the birth dates by a few decades.
I am still working on some touch-ups but I think the bulk of the material is ready for consumption.
Here is the link to the tutorials: http://www.holowczak.com/tutorials.html#oracletutorials
As always please send me any comments and feedback you may have.
Cheers,
Rich H.
Tuesday, January 8, 2013
Monday, January 7, 2013
Updated Microsoft Access 2007/2010 Tutorial
Folks:
I am putting the finishing touches on a revision to my MS Access 2007/2010 tutorial. This is the latest in a series of Access tutorials I have been working on for the last 10 years or so. If you have never used MS Access before and wanted to learn, I think this will be a great chance for you to get started.
The tutorial covers the basics of relational database and then goes into creating tables, forms, queries, reports and Navigation Forms in Access.
It seems there are enough annoying differences between Access 2007 and 2010 that I had to add more comments and notes, etc. The main section I added was on building Navigation Forms which are a new feature in Access 2010 intended to replace the Switchboard.
Since a lot of students have Apple Mac computers (such as an iMac, MacBook, etc) I thought I would add a few notes about how to get your Mac to run Microsoft Access. As far as I know, Access has to run under a Microsoft operating system. To make it work on a Mac you will need a legitimate copy of the Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7 Operating system from Microsoft. More details are found in section 1.3 of the tutorial.
As far as I know there is no way to run Microsoft Access on an iPhone or iPad, etc.
Here is the updated MS Access 2007/2010 tutorial: http://www.holowczak.com/tutorials.html#msaccesstutorials
As always your comments and suggestions are welcome.
Cheers,
Rich H.
I am putting the finishing touches on a revision to my MS Access 2007/2010 tutorial. This is the latest in a series of Access tutorials I have been working on for the last 10 years or so. If you have never used MS Access before and wanted to learn, I think this will be a great chance for you to get started.
The tutorial covers the basics of relational database and then goes into creating tables, forms, queries, reports and Navigation Forms in Access.
It seems there are enough annoying differences between Access 2007 and 2010 that I had to add more comments and notes, etc. The main section I added was on building Navigation Forms which are a new feature in Access 2010 intended to replace the Switchboard.
Since a lot of students have Apple Mac computers (such as an iMac, MacBook, etc) I thought I would add a few notes about how to get your Mac to run Microsoft Access. As far as I know, Access has to run under a Microsoft operating system. To make it work on a Mac you will need a legitimate copy of the Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7 Operating system from Microsoft. More details are found in section 1.3 of the tutorial.
As far as I know there is no way to run Microsoft Access on an iPhone or iPad, etc.
Here is the updated MS Access 2007/2010 tutorial: http://www.holowczak.com/tutorials.html#msaccesstutorials
As always your comments and suggestions are welcome.
Cheers,
Rich H.
Saturday, January 5, 2013
Getting Started with Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 using C++
Folks:
We are getting ready to gear up for the Spring semester. This means a lot of students will be starting their first programming course or possibly their first C++ course. Many programming and C++ courses make use of Microsoft Visual Studio (MSVS). MSVS is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) used to develop software. IDE's combine source code editors, compiler, linker and possibly many other tools such as debuggers, source code management, database management, etc.
Love it or hate it, MSVS is used by many programming shops and for students hoping to do software development for a career, I believe you would be well served to learn the basics of this vast set of tools.
I fully appreciate that a certain number of you simply hate Microsoft and all of their products. Also some of you might be keen on doing Mobile App development for iOS or Android. Others may only want to do development under Linux. Those are fine and there are IDE's such as Eclipse and Xcode that you can explore as well for those environments.
For now though, your professor or instructor may have indicated you should use MSVS and so now you are faced with the task of getting up to speed as quickly as possible. Basically I think you need to learn enough about MSVS so that you can efficiently:
Please take a look and let me know what you think. I am adding new topics all of the time so please send in your suggestions.
Cheers,
Rich H.
We are getting ready to gear up for the Spring semester. This means a lot of students will be starting their first programming course or possibly their first C++ course. Many programming and C++ courses make use of Microsoft Visual Studio (MSVS). MSVS is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) used to develop software. IDE's combine source code editors, compiler, linker and possibly many other tools such as debuggers, source code management, database management, etc.
Love it or hate it, MSVS is used by many programming shops and for students hoping to do software development for a career, I believe you would be well served to learn the basics of this vast set of tools.
I fully appreciate that a certain number of you simply hate Microsoft and all of their products. Also some of you might be keen on doing Mobile App development for iOS or Android. Others may only want to do development under Linux. Those are fine and there are IDE's such as Eclipse and Xcode that you can explore as well for those environments.
For now though, your professor or instructor may have indicated you should use MSVS and so now you are faced with the task of getting up to speed as quickly as possible. Basically I think you need to learn enough about MSVS so that you can efficiently:
- Write and edit source code
- Run the Code -> Compile -> Debug cycle very quickly
- Use a debugger to see where your code has problems
- Document and format your assignments and projects
- Back up and possibly share your projects
Please take a look and let me know what you think. I am adding new topics all of the time so please send in your suggestions.
Cheers,
Rich H.
Friday, January 4, 2013
Social Media Buttons
Folks
Just finished an afternoon of adding social media buttons to my web site.
I had started to add individual Google +1 buttons here and there (Instructions here: https://developers.google.com/+/plugins/+1button/) and then I moved on to learning about Facebook "Like" and "Share" buttons (Instructions here http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like/).
I finished it off by adding a link to my LinkedIn page. This was really just a plain HREF to my LinkedIn profile surrounding a Linkedin "In" icon.
I ran into a few fairly common problems when trying to match up all of the different buttons. One of the main issues is that many of the social media buttons will expand and/or pop-up when the user mouses over them. So placing the buttons and getting them consistent can be a bit tricky.
Since I code all of my web pages by hand, I have a lo of fine grained control over this but it takes some tinkering to get things working right. In the end, I came up with a solution of using a borderless table
<TABLE BORDER=0 CELLPADDING=0>
Then placing each of the buttons in a cell of the table.
Since most of the social media buttons will take the current web page as the "source" of the "like" or +1, it makes it easy to just add these codes to every page. My web hosting company supports server side includes so I was able to make a small "social_media.shtml" file containing the various JavaScript parts and my table with a row of buttons. Now I can easily add this setup to any web page using a #include statement.
It is still not looking quite as slick as what you see on a WordPress site but it is getting the job done for now.
Have a look at www.holowczak.com/tutorial.html for example and let me know what you think.
Cheers,
Rich H.
Just finished an afternoon of adding social media buttons to my web site.
I had started to add individual Google +1 buttons here and there (Instructions here: https://developers.google.com/+/plugins/+1button/) and then I moved on to learning about Facebook "Like" and "Share" buttons (Instructions here http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like/).
I finished it off by adding a link to my LinkedIn page. This was really just a plain HREF to my LinkedIn profile surrounding a Linkedin "In" icon.
I ran into a few fairly common problems when trying to match up all of the different buttons. One of the main issues is that many of the social media buttons will expand and/or pop-up when the user mouses over them. So placing the buttons and getting them consistent can be a bit tricky.
Since I code all of my web pages by hand, I have a lo of fine grained control over this but it takes some tinkering to get things working right. In the end, I came up with a solution of using a borderless table
<TABLE BORDER=0 CELLPADDING=0>
Then placing each of the buttons in a cell of the table.
Since most of the social media buttons will take the current web page as the "source" of the "like" or +1, it makes it easy to just add these codes to every page. My web hosting company supports server side includes so I was able to make a small "social_media.shtml" file containing the various JavaScript parts and my table with a row of buttons. Now I can easily add this setup to any web page using a #include statement.
It is still not looking quite as slick as what you see on a WordPress site but it is getting the job done for now.
Have a look at www.holowczak.com/tutorial.html for example and let me know what you think.
Cheers,
Rich H.
Thursday, January 3, 2013
New Tutorials on www.holowczak.com
Folks
I have been working on setting up new tutorials on my web site www.holowczak.com. This week I posted two new tutorials on using Microsoft Visio to draw Entity Relationship models.
Many database classes/courses make E-R modeling a big part of the class. Traditional E-R notations like Crow's Feet notation can be easily mapped out in Visio. However if you need to use UML notation, Visio will not support it using Entity-Relationship diagrams. Instead you can use a UML Class Diagram with Associations (like Relationships) to draw your model.
In any case I created two different tutorials you can follow to get up and running with Microsoft Visio very quickly. Just visit the Tutorials page: http://www.holowczak.com/tutorials.html and scroll to the bottom to see the links.
Cheers,
Rich H.
I have been working on setting up new tutorials on my web site www.holowczak.com. This week I posted two new tutorials on using Microsoft Visio to draw Entity Relationship models.
Many database classes/courses make E-R modeling a big part of the class. Traditional E-R notations like Crow's Feet notation can be easily mapped out in Visio. However if you need to use UML notation, Visio will not support it using Entity-Relationship diagrams. Instead you can use a UML Class Diagram with Associations (like Relationships) to draw your model.
In any case I created two different tutorials you can follow to get up and running with Microsoft Visio very quickly. Just visit the Tutorials page: http://www.holowczak.com/tutorials.html and scroll to the bottom to see the links.
Cheers,
Rich H.
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