I am back now at testing HTMLDB 2.2 after last year's tutorial. At any rate, there a number of new features with the tool although it is still missing some very obvious ones.
The most striking one is the lack of stacked, tabbed canvases. When you deal with master-detail forms, it is almost the case that you need to spread out the details info on several tabs (well at least 2 or three tabs). On the otn forum, I have seen that one post requested this feature in the upcoming release of apex 3.0 and another post stated that this tabbed canvas issue can be implemented with some DHTML tricks.
Learning to use Apex is one thing but if that also entails becoming a Javascript, Ajax, DHTML guru, then I guess we are missing the issue at hand which is managing and/or processing the database data.
Going back to Oracle Forms, the onus is on the developers and specifically the people writing the PL/SQL code
and libraries required to implement the business rules. With Apex, it looks like most of the issues that are being raised now on otn deal with the design/interface side of the application. As such, I hope that the Apex team should put all its energy toward resolving/implementing those features that made Forms such a formidable tool.
Last, a google search for HTMLDB/Apex course or lecture notes yields no results at the present time.
Oracle Apex (HTMLDB) 2.2