PostgreSQL Developers Handbook (Developer's Library)

click here for more details, find new or used items	Ewald Geschwinde, Hans-Jüergen Schöenig Our price £21.77 (£32.99) New from £16.76 Used from £5.63 Pages: 768 (Paperback) ISBN: 0672322609 Pub: Sams Pub date: 2002-01-04 Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 565527

Reader Reviews:

Useful, but flawed (3/3 people found this helpful)

After beginning to use PostgreSQL as my RDBMS of choice for Perl backend I bought this book to help get me up to speed with it quickly.

Overall it's worked, the book is fairly comprehensive and comprehensible most of the time but is let down by a few glaring mistakes which really should have been caught before release, some which stick in my mind being Table 11.1 'An Overview of BCD and Decimal Codes' which implies BCD can only encode the digits 8 and 9, and a rather wonderfully broken section on pg.221 reading 'We want to go into further detail at this point, because this would lead too far and won't help you when running your database'. Generally things which could cause confusion rather than disaster.

Whilst this book is good for me I don't think it'd suit a beginner to databases, you'd need to have a fairly good grasp of SQL to really follow this as it does have an 'Introductory chapter' but then proceeds to start throwing terms such as outer joins, subqueries, intersections and so on around with minimal explanation. Great if you know them already, but if not you'll need another reference to learn them from.

Comprehensive (3/3 people found this helpful)

There are lots of books on MySQL, but few on PostgreSQL. This book is excellent, it covers the SQL language for people who are completely new to databases, and also tells how you can use Pg/SQL, C, C++, PHP and Perl to interact with the database.

It covers installation, creating databases, tables, users, functions, and all other forms of administration, like analysing the tables, optimising queries and backing up and restoring data. I found this a very thorough read, which complements the online PostgreSQL manual very well.

If you have only one PostgreSQL book in your collection, I would strongly advice that this is one of them.

Good coverage of basics (9/9 people found this helpful)

If you're a developer who's thinking of using postgres this book covers just about all you need to get started. Only basic DBA duties are covered. If that's your bag, I'd subtract a star or two.

(Note: contrary to the impression given by another review on this site, this book is not about hacking postgres internals)

Beware, this book is for developers OF postgresSQL! (5/15 people found this helpful)

PostgresSQL is an open source DBMS developed by team of volunteers. This book appears to be intended for people who want to contribute to this fine development effort.
It may be very useful to THEM, but to ME (as a mere mortal who only wants to use PostgresSQL for developing my own apps) it is of very little use and was rather a waste of money.

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