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34 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Good for anyone wanting to learn PostgreSQL, January 18, 2002
This review is from: PostgreSQL Developer's Handbook (Paperback)
This book is a good start for anyone interested in using the PostgreSQL database server. This book covers the fundamentals from installing the server to basics of managing the databases and its users. My only gripe with this book was the lack of covereage of all the pg_* functions. It does talk about some of the functions but not all. In addition, the authors do not talk about the configuration files associated with PostgreSQL in depth. However, the questions that I did have were happily answered by Hans (one of the co-author of this book). If you are a developer like myself that works with PERL, PHP, or Python, you will find the information in this book very helpful. The authors discuss in detail on how to interface PostgreSQL with these languages. In addition, there is a good tutorial on the basics of SQL and the terminologies associated with it. This is not a good reference on SQL but a good refresher. If you are a complete novice to the world of databases, you might not find this book as easily digestible. This book does make certain assumptions, namely, familiarity and comfort with using a command prompt either on UNIX, Linux, or Windows. PostgreSQL is a little tricky to install on Windows if you are not comfortable with the assumptions made by the authors. If you are a DBA, look elsewhere for advanced topics like load balancing and replication using PostgreSQL. This book is more of a welcome to PostgreSQL type than an advanced database management book using PostgreSQL. Like every book in the market, this one is not perfect either. However, the positive aspects of this book far outweigh the missing literature. I would not recommend this book if you are a complete novice to databases. If you are coming from another database application or server, you will definitely feel comfortable with the author's informal style of presenting the information. Developers will also feel at home with this book and get up to speed fairly quickly.
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23 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent Resource, March 8, 2002
By A Customer
This review is from: PostgreSQL Developer's Handbook (Paperback)
This is a great PostgreSQL book, better in my opinion than the O'Reilly or Wrox book. They are all better than the book by Perkins. This book is for someone who knows a little bit about SQL and databases. The chaper on SQL is not too large, which is exactly what it should be. There are enough SQL books! The SQL chapter is to-the-point, more as an overview of available SQL functionality in the database. The O'Reilly book spends too much time being a SQL tutorial, combine that with a chapter on some product for Apache called LXP, and a whole section on commands, you are left with pretty much 50% of the book dedicated to SQL. An end-user, with little database or SQL experience will probably like the Wrox book best. Someone who is going to administer PostgreSQL or a developer (especially a developer) will probably find this book more suited to their skill level and requirements. The book is well written and covers most of the major items of concern. Part II of the book includes real world examples, which are very helpful. The largest chaper is chapter 9, which covers programming interfaces between various languages such as C, Perl, Python, PHP, Java, etc. There is also a helpful chapter on dealing with binary data and date calculations. In my opinion, this book, along with the New Riders reference book, work well together.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
= * * *, August 12, 2002
This review is from: PostgreSQL Developer's Handbook (Paperback)
I infer from the title that this book is not primarily for end users or DBAs, but instead for developers who want to interact with PostgreSQL as part of a larger application context. I do not see any other books in mid 2002 which seem to have the same target. I would say this book goes into a little more depth for the application developer than the other notable PostgreSQL books I have seen (Practical pgsql, pgsql Essential Reference, Beginning Databases with pgsql), but not much, and the more useful information is mixed with a lot of less useful information. I do not think this book is a waste of money, but it is definitely not a must have.
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