Date & Datetime problems

Hi there folks,
I am a new user with Linux and Postgres, and I am investigating the
possibilities of using Postgres as my main dB for Data Acquisition
applications over a network. I would like the following help (if
possible):

1) A good reference book for ecpg & libpq
2) what the format of the date & datetime fields must be i.e. if I
create a table such as 'create table daten(date1 date, date2
datetime)' what is the format of the date and a=date time. I have
tried all of the formats mentioned in the .html Programmers manuals,
but none seem to work.

Thank for the help!

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