I suppose I don't necessarily need an actual reference book per se, but I tend to learn as I go. Thus, it would be nice to have some kind of terse but readable book that I can read in chunks either if I need help remembering the syntax of a particular query or if I want to learn about particular database features one at a time.
It seems like there are a lot of choices for books on Oracle. Could anyone offer some suggestions to help narrow things down?
Personally, I like this book -- but then, I've always had a soft spot for O'Reilly (even before I was one of their writers;-), so I guess your mileage may differ!
There is a lot of really good free documentation here that is well worthing reading, or dipping into for particular topics. You can read them online, or download as PDFs and print them. Particularly worth while is the Concepts manual.
Probably the best Oracle book I have is Tom Kyte's Expert One-on-One Oracle.
Not directly relevant to the question at hand, but I find this book helpful since I'm using Python for this: Python Programming with Oracle Database