Book excerpt: In this fast paced technological age, where things change rapidly, no one has the time to go through lengthy concept books just to assess what the technology has for them. As an IT professional, I too prefer concise practical books that do not take long to understand the features offered by the new technology. As a strong supporter of practical stuff, I have endeavored to write this book on Oracle Application Express. In this book, I am sharing my personal APEX learning experience that I got by developing a clone of the sample application provided with Oracle Application Express. This book will walk you through to create a professional looking web-based database application. A great starting point for novice and equally beneficial for intermediate users, this book will allow users to practically explore Oracle Application Express (APEX) themselves. Besides creation of individual application pages, this book will demonstrate many professional techniques, summarized at the end of each chapter, to apply them to your own projects. Leaving out the boring bits, this book will emphasize on the inspiring and realistic example from the first chapter and will provide guidance in the following areas to make it a one-stop solution: -APEX introduction -Create APEX development environment -Create a professional looking web-based database application in APEX -Advanced Reporting -Application deployment -Access the application, remotely and in LAN If you really want to know what APEX is, try the practical stuff provided in this book and become an APEX fan. I hope this to be the best practical book on Oracle Application Express.