I don’t know you, but I like to work with the PDF version of the documentation. The problem is that the PDF files have names that are not very useful (or do you remember that the SQL Reference Guide is named e10592.pdf?). Hence, when I download the documentation, I like to store each PDF with its title as a file name. In addition, for easy access, I put them under the My Documents menu. The following image shows how it looks like on my laptop.

The structure of the menu under My Documents

It goes without saying that doing that for the 148 files of the documentation library is not only boring, but it is also very time consuming. Hence, I did it in the following way:

  • opened the master book list
  • extracted the HTML code associated to the table containing the list of PDF files
  • applied a small XSL transformation to generate a script that downloads all files
  • executed the script

In this way I just had to start the script and about 10 minutes later the whole documentation library was stored locally. Note that with such a script it is also very simple to periodically re-download all files. Just to keep them up-to-date…

If you think that it is something useful for you, feel free to download it by clicking the following link: download.cmd. The only requirement is that wget must be installed on your system. For me GNU Wget works fine.

Update (6:16 pm): a colleague of mine, Dani Rey, sent me a KSH version of the script. Feel free to download this one as well: download.ksh. Thank you Dani!

Update 2011-04-01: this post provides scripts to download the documentation of 10.2, 11.1 and 11.2.

Update 2017-02-01: I refreshed the scripts.

Update 2020-03-15: I removed the link to the download.ksh script.