Learning Oracle for the first time

I am a very experienced MS Sql developer, and a few new job positions are coming my way where I will be working with Oracle on a more daily basis.

As with all the technologies I have learned, I want to know the best places and books to get started and up to speed with designing and developing with Oracle, but with pure C#.

What resources are there for us Microsoft guys to jump in and go with Oracle? I realize there is oracle.com and asktom.oracle.com, as well as the mass amount of documentation on Oracle, I am looking more for a quick primer (setting up a server, getting some sample data to play with, etc...) rather than in depth sql vs. oracle technology comparisons.

Thanks in advance.

From stackoverflow

• Look here for getting a copy of the Oracle server to play with.

  Look here to compare using Oracle extensions vs. ANSI SQL to get the same resultset from a a table. While not comprehensive, it gives, I think, some insight on how Oracle users think vs. how ANSI SQL users think.

  Tom Anderson : Wow, talk about thinking quite differently

• Oracle Developer Tools for Visual Studio

  White Paper: New 11g Features in Oracle Developer Tools (PDF)

  Oracle Database with Windows and .NET

  Oracle by Example: Building ASP.NET Web Applications with ODT

  Oracle by Example: Building .NET Applications Using ODT

  Oracle by Example: Debugging Oracle PL/SQL from Visual Studio

  Oracle by Example: Using Oracle User-Defined Types with .NET and Visual Studio

  Oracle Magazine: Build Applications with ODT and Oracle User-Defined Types

  ODT FAQ: Answers to Common OTN Discussion Forum Questions

  Tom Anderson : Definitely some things i needed, thanks.

• Try getting Tom Kyte's books Expert one-on-one Oracle and Effective Oracle by Design. They're good intermediate-advanced level Oracle books that are well written by someone who knows the product well.

  Additionally, get to know the data dictionary. If you have aspirations to be anything more than a 'tools guy' in the Oracle world the data dictionary is your friend. It's also much better than the one in SQL Server.

  Finally, if you're moving to Oracle from a MS-Only world, get some background in unix and shell script programming. You will find this very useful when scripting automation infrastructure for Oracle systems, particularly if they sit on vanilla Unix installs. There is any amount of legacy Oracle/Unix kit still in production and vanilla installs of Solaris, AIX or HP/UX tend to be much more spartan than Linux. In the Unix/Oracle world you can't necessarily rely on being able to install Perl or Python.

  When you do have access to Perl or Python, get to know these as well. If you're into python, the best Oracle database interface library is cx_Oracle. I can't really vouch for any particular Perl infrastructure as I have never had occasion to use it for this type of work. CPAN is the canonical resource for add-on modules for Perl.

  In the (relatively unlikely) event that you're working on an Oracle/Windows environment(Oracle on Linux is more widely used in low-end Oracle deployments), good Windows distributions of both Perl and Python can be downloaded from Activestate.

  Matthew Watson : can't up this one enough.. If you want to know best practices for Oracle Kyte is your man.

  Tom Anderson : +1 thanks, this is the kind of insight i can use

• Whilst I see you want a quick intro I think it is worth mentioning Tom Kyte's roadmap to the Oracle Documentation

  http://asktom.oracle.com/pls/asktom/z?p_url=ASKTOM%2Edownload_file%3Fp_file%3D4266102912305380863&p_cat=Oracle%20inside%20cover%200703.pdf