Just some comments, 

I really appreciate the opportunity to read yours first drafts it's an
honor for me to share some of my points or view with you. I've just
finish to read the chapter 1, I'm going to read it one more time to
delve into some points, particularly I'd like to 
"play" with some examples codes. By now I just want to discuss some
general ideas about your book. 
  Expert one_on_one Performance by Design seems to be a good title,
apparently different to the others performance books. I have been
waiting for that kind of book long time since I've never read a good
one, except for Guy Harrison SQL Tuning but I was looking for a book
with a more global (general) approach. The first items has a general
approach applicable to others database engines for instance the
ancestral communication problems 
between DBA's and Developers exists in all team regardless the operating
system, database engines, programming languages, etc. It's a 
good point to start to talk, if that synergic doesn't exist the project
probably will fail. 
Regarding reading concepts i'm with you, i don't know why the most
DBA/Developers have never read at the least the "Concepts" or 
Administration Guide" as you mentioned on the item 11. I really can't
figure out why people always are looking for the easiest path or 
shortcuts and they don't understand that if they really want to be good
they must start with the bases. I'd added to your list (roadmap) of
Oracle Manuals, some RDBMS RDBMS theorist books, like "A first Course in
Database System" by Jeffrey Ullman.
 What I really like of this book is that it's full of real scenarios and
many mentions to your site (I'm the guy who sent to asktom the question
regarding commit ;-), Item 10 in Chapter 1) .Most of the authors don't
have enough practical experience to share so many real world examples as
you put in your book (even Jonathan really amazing DBA book doesn't have
many examples,IMHO), I guess the next chapters will contain even more
examples and codes. I'm waiting for the chapter related to Oracle Myths,
its will be very useful for me to teach to our developers. In my 4 years
of Oracle experience I've seen many developers who don't know almost
anything about database design and SQL programming. They generate really
bad sql query that kill the database, one of my duties in my company is
tuning sql and try to teach developers ,who maybe are good  programmer
with some experience with Informix or DB2 but they don't understand how
Oracle works, the item3 is great on this. At the last, I have a doubt:
what is the other word for the last S on KISS?  :-D


Regards
Pablo A. Rovedo

Sorry, for my poor English, I'm studying hard to improve it.