Learning is not a spectator sport

I spend a lot of time in the Oracle database documentation, and because I like to be able to navigate it as efficiently as possible, I’ll typically download the entire set of the docs to have a local copy.  (If you’ve ever experienced the latency from Perth to … well … anywhere except Perth 😁 ) then you’ll know why I do this.

But even once I’ve done this, launching the list of books in the database documentation gives me a page like this:

There are two things that slow me down here:

1. The list is very long to scroll because of the descriptions associated with each book. I don’t really need all that description text.
2. The books I most commonly access are not at the top of the list.  (If you are spending most of your day, every day, in the Advanced Cluster File System Administration Guide, then I suspect you have some deeper Oracle issues that you should contacting Support about!)

So here’s are my two customizations that I always do to the books.html file (after taking a backup copy of the original!)

1) Remove the descriptions

Scroll down through the meta section until you get to the “dcterms” section.  (In reality, pretty much anywhere will do, but if you’re a HTML newbie, here is the place)

Add the style elements to the block the display of “.well”  and you’re good to go.

Now the book list is more compact

Note: Years ago I found this “.well” tip on someone’s blog, but I’ve long since forgotten who and where, but please take this as a shout-out o thanks to you, anonymous soul!

2) Reshuffle the book order

I’m going to pretty much live in the SQL and PL/SQL guides most of the time, and be jumping into the more common administration level books as well.

If you continue down through the HTML document, you’ll see logically grouping of “div” sections for each book.  Simply (and carefully 😁 ) cut-paste the book sections you want at the top and paste them above the first book entry (for “Advanced Cluster File System Administration Guide”)

and voila! There you go! The most commonly used books will be sitting there right at the top of your list. No more hand and shoulder strain from scrolling!