Re: Book recommendation

Jean-Christian Imbeault wrote:
> Bruce Momjian wrote:
> > People ask here about good PostgreSQL books, so I thought I would
> > mention one I saw for the first time today. It was:
> >
> > PHP and PostgreSQL Advanced Web Programming
> > by Ewald Geschwinde, Hans-Juergen Schoenig
> >
> > I was very impressed by the book. The title suggests it is PHP with
> > PostgreSQL, but in fact it seemed more like PHP _and_ PostgreSQL,
> > meaning they didn't present PostgreSQL just in passing as part of PHP.
> > They gave it full treatment. For example, it had a nice section on
> > PL/PgSQL.
>
> I bought this book when I decided to go with PosgreSQL. One reason being
> that there are very few recent books on PostgreSQL. I also bough the
> "PostgreSQL Developer's Handbook" by the same authors.
>
> I'm a total newbie with database so please keep this in mind when
> reading my opinion of the books.
>
> 1- Buy "PHP and PostgreSQL", and skip the "Developer's Handbook". The
> PHP book seems to have much more up-to-date info and sometimes goes into
> more details than the Handbook strangely enough.

Yea, the Developer's Handbook is mostly reference. It does have details
on stuff not in the docs, but any reference-style book will age very
quickly because PostgreSQL advances so quickly.

> 2- Neither of the books went into enough detail for for me. I'm the kind
> of guy that needs two things, to be show *how* to do something and *why*
> the way shown is a good (the best hopefully). I.e. I need to understand
> the underlying mechanics of what I am doing/being shown.

I hope my book helped on the "why" part. It is lacking in that it isn't
for advanced users, i.e. "Introduction and Concepts".

> 3- PostgreSQL is full of features, very few of them are explained. I
> didn't know there were so many built-in functions. I get most of my info
> for built-in function from the Info Docs since the books barely
> mention *any* functions.

Yep, PostgreSQL it the moving target again.

> 4- They do have a section on PL/PgSQL but it really is lacking. After
> reading it I can only program the most basic of functions. Worse ... I
> still have no idea when I should be using PL/PgSQL.

I thought it did a nice job on the mechanics of doing things in
PL/PgSQL. Of course, you can write an entire book on PL/PgSQL, and
Oreilly has a PL/SQL (Oracle) book that I recommend because our
implementation is so close to theirs. I think I am going to buy the
O'Reilly book soon.

> 5- A section on query optimization, or better yet how to read Explain's
> output would seem to be a necessity but there's isn't one.

That gets into the need to understand internals. You may find links on
the PostgreSQL Developers page helpful in this, and our official docs
have info on reading EXPLAIN. I think between those two you will get
it.

> All in all I'd have to say it's probably the best book out there but
> that's just because there really aren't any others. I was hoping for
> more from it ...

I understand. Books all shoot for different competence levels and
different scopes. If one book hit it all we would only have one book on
each topic. ;-)

> Bruce's online book is almost as useful ...

Thanks.

> But to be honest I needed some hand-holding and this gave it to me until
> I started feeling comfortable with PG and until I found the mailing list :)

In many ways that is the core of the books. They will have trouble
competing with the online docs, which are updated for every release, and
with the mailing lists, that can tap into a huge amount of experience.

--
Bruce Momjian | http://candle.pha.pa.us
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