Good resources/advice for Apex newbies?

I'm planning to use Apex with students to learn database systems. I'm new to Apex myself.

In my - very rough - view of what I want them to be able to 开发者_StackOverflow社区do, I'm tempted to tell them to "stick to the wizards". The idea is that the real work is SQL, and Apex is only there to check that their idea works and to give them the satisfaction of completing something.

Two problems: (1) Is "stick to the wizards" good advice? Is it likely that a newcomer will follow a standard path, and obtain a uncontrollable mess as a result?

(2) Are there good resources that help with the basics? What I have found aims high compared to the complete newbie implementing, say, an order form.

If the point of the training is to learn about the database and SQL, and not about Apex itself, then using the built-in wizards is the simplest way to use Apex, and shouldn't lead to any major problems provided you don't have tables with more than 2 columns in the primary key (which is all the form wizards can handle until version 4.1 at least).

I don't have any learning resources to suggest other than the 2 Day + Application Express Developer's Guide which you have probably already encountered.

In my opinion, a student needing to learn the Oracle database should first learn to do simple tasks in SQL*Plus (or perhaps SQL Developer) - such as CREATE TABLE, SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE.

Then, they'll have the foundation on which to understand what tools like Apex are doing for them.