SQL & PL/SQL

Here is what documentation says: "SELECT... FOR UPDATE statements are often used by interactive programs that allow a user to modify fields of one or more specific rows (which might take some time); row locks are acquired so that only a single interactive program user is updating the rows at any given time."

My questions:
1) Is "SELECT ... FOR UPDATE" approach generally good and safe approach when dealing with long running and short running DMLs that can influence one another like, for example, delete a row and cause ORA-08006: specified row no longer exists while merging etc.
2) what other approaches are worth considering (if any)?
3) if "SELECT ... FOR UPDATE" is used on a query with a view, are underlying tables locked too?

thanks