PostgreSQL Developers Handbook Review - SAMS
by Ewald Geschwinde, Hans-Jüergen Schöenig
ISBN: 0672322609
The PostgreSQL Developers handbook by Ewald Geschwinde and Hans-Jurgen Schonig is a great book to get started with PostgreSQL's powerful object relational database server.
It starts with a brief history of PostgreSQL and quickly moves on to installation on Unix, and Windows. Basic administration tasks such as starting and stoppign the server are also covered here.
The book then goes on to cover the basic concepts of RDBM's (tables, columns, indexes, constraints, etc), and basic SQL. Although the chapter is entitiled "An Introduction to SQL", it manages to cover many commonly used SQL statements.
The PostgreSQL Developers Handbook continues to cover more advanced topics such as server administration (including backup and recovery), performance tuning, PL/SQL, transactions, and so on.
I found Chapter 10 "Open Source Software" to be a handy chapter that outlines some open source tools available for use with PostgreSQL. Though since publication, there are a lot more tools avaliable.
This book is definetly focused more towards the developer rather than the Database Administrator. Though the administration coverage is pretty good, there is much more coverage for the developer. The entire second section of the book (11 chapters) is dedicated to "Practical PostgreSQL Solutions" which are basically real world code examples using PostgreSQL.
Overall this book was useful to me as someone fimiliar with SQL Server moving to PostgreSQL.
