Joan E. Casteel combines more than 15 years of hands-on experience in application development in various business environments with strong teaching skills to clarify important application and software concepts for today's readers. An award-winning instructor, Ms. Casteel serves as associate professor of information technology and business at Tidewater Community College, where she has been an integral part of the Database Specialist curriculum. She has joined a newly formed team at the college in charge of building a campus ID card program to encompass four campuses, using a recently deployed Oracle-based system. In addition the team is developing new Oracle APEX applications to improve college-wide financial services support. Ms. Casteel has been recognized by her colleagues for her professional accomplishments, including creating an Oracle virtual machine image for students and handling recruitment efforts for database specialist career studies. Ms. Casteel is the author of two successful books on Oracle from Course Technology, part of Cengage Learning, covering SQL and PL/SQL which serve as the introductory course sequence in the college's database career path.