Re: postgresql book - practical or something newer?

"Ow Mun Heng" <Ow(dot)Mun(dot)Heng(at)wdc(dot)com> writes:

> <rant>
> One of the worst aspect of PG is the documentation, or the lack of it in
> terms of "traditional" house. The Manual is fine and all, but in most
> cases, what I find that it lacks is actually examples. Either examples
> to show what it a particular field/query means but also as a way to show
> exactly how a particular problem can be solved.

I always thought one of the best things about the manual was that it has tons
of examples. Arguably too many examples for a reference manual but personally
I find it easier to learn from examples than reference text anyways so I
appreciate it.

> When I played with both MSSQL and MySQL, I had loads of books (and I
> bought a bit of it too, didn't bother subscribing to safari, it just
> ain't a book!) to be used as reference and what not.
>
> In PG, all there is, is the manual, a book by Robert Treat, the Book
> from Joshua, 1 or 2 other books authored by someone I can't remember etc
> and that's about it.

Actually there are several other books, but they're mostly out of date. This
is the biggest source of the problem you're complaining about I think. Most of
the features you're looking for documentation for will be from the last 2-3
years and it takes about that long for books to get into print.

In fact I think most of the features you'll look for examples of will be from
the last 1-2 years. When 8.3 comes out people will be looking for whole books
on XML functionality, tsearch implementations, etc, and there will be nothing
aside from the manual since they're all brand new features.

--
Gregory Stark
EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com
Ask me about EnterpriseDB's On-Demand Production Tuning