Rating: 
Summary: don't bother if you are experienced database developer
Review: This book is a very good reference work. I expect the major usefulness will be to for programmers (both C programmers making modifications to the source and also for SQL programmers). Another reviewer said it was mostly a padding of the FAQ (which is 8 pages, developer FAQ + 18 pages for the general FAQ) whereas the book is well over 400 pages. I don't really see any sort of connection there. Suggested improvements: Add a long section on installation. The book does not mention running the regression tests. The regression tests can be difficult to configure, and this is especially so under Cygwin on NT or Win2K. Also, maintenance operations and bulk copy operations should be much, much larger with copious examples.If you plan to program in PostgreSQL or modify the PostgreSQL program, you must buy this book. Also highly recommended is the somewhat obscure paper: "Enhacement of the ANSI SQL Implementation of PostgreSQL" by Gottlob & Seyr. PostgreSQL is the ONLY fully functional SQL implementation with a TRULY open license. I hope to see more fine efforts like this in the future.
Rating: 
Summary: A very good reference
Review: This book is a very good reference work. I expect the major usefulness will be to for programmers (both C programmers making modifications to the source and also for SQL programmers). Another reviewer said it was mostly a padding of the FAQ (which is 8 pages, developer FAQ + 18 pages for the general FAQ) whereas the book is well over 400 pages. I don't really see any sort of connection there. Suggested improvements: Add a long section on installation. The book does not mention running the regression tests. The regression tests can be difficult to configure, and this is especially so under Cygwin on NT or Win2K. Also, maintenance operations and bulk copy operations should be much, much larger with copious examples. If you plan to program in PostgreSQL or modify the PostgreSQL program, you must buy this book. Also highly recommended is the somewhat obscure paper: "Enhacement of the ANSI SQL Implementation of PostgreSQL" by Gottlob & Seyr. PostgreSQL is the ONLY fully functional SQL implementation with a TRULY open license. I hope to see more fine efforts like this in the future.
Rating: 
Summary: Better than the reviews suggest!
Review: This book took me from being a SQL novice (let alone a PostgreSQL novice) to being able to being able to use PostgreSQL for business apps. I'm not quite sure why some reviewers knocked it. It has much more content than the FAQ, good examples and a reference section. One reviewer knocked the reference section, claiming the book was half full of appendices... in fact the reference section is what you most often go to the book for after you've worked through the basic concepts in the first section. I think the layout is slightly odd - the examples of commands and their results are grouped together in sections that are usually a page or two ahead of the text that explains them. So you spend a bit of time flicking pages to see examples. But once you get the hang of this style it's not exactly the biggest pain in the world. I think it's a very good book, one that took me from being a SQL beginner yet is still useful as a day to day reference. Lee
Rating:
Summary: A First Class Introduction to PostgreSQL
Review: This is book is pretty well a "must" for immigrants from the world of DOS and Win* and the aggravations of MSAccess. The volume offers a first class tutorial and introduction to running postgreSQL from the command line. There is essentially no discussion about any of the GUI front ends available, such as the pgaccess interface in KDE (nine sentences in three paragraphs at the end of Chapter 16). However, the fact, which becomes obvious working through the book, is that GUI interfaces are really unnecessary to use the program. The book reflects some *nix idiosyncracies that would be ex-users of DOS and Win* will find puzzling, if not outright baffling. These oddities - to DOS and Win* users - have more to do with the Linux platform and *nix traditions in general, than with PostgreSQL per se. One of these is that there is no discussion of formatting printed or screen-displayed reports, which in the DOS / Win* world are the normal end products of queries. This reflects, by total neglect of the topic, the author's expectation that a postgreSQL user will be capturing output and processing it with other programs. This is a historical characteristic of *nix, but quite alien thinking to other systems. This is where the overly brief discussion of using 10 different programing languages as front and back end interfaces to postgreSQL comes in, and for ex-DOS/Win* users more discussion would be incredibly useful. More often than not we have been used to employing the monolithic utility of programs such as Access or dBASE from data input through querying, data quality control, and reporting. There is also a clear opportunity here for some aspiring open-source or even shareware author to produce a handy, stand alone report formatter. Half of the book is contained in appendices and includes a very useful reference manual in Appendix D. Were I the author, I would be shuffling appendices so that D became A in the next incarnation of this book. All in all, this book is a must-read for those of us migrating to Linux and postgreSQL.
Rating:
Summary: Great first book on PostgreSQL
Review: This is the first book I've seen on PostgreSQL. It's been in progress for sometime, and had been available in electronic form. However, the print version is sure to be a gem. It contains information needed by anyone trying to get a handle on PostgreSQL, beginner or advanced. The folks starting to use PostgreSQL will have alot of examples on standard SQL for database access, including transaction support. The more advanced users will appreciate the level of detail including how PostgreSQL differs from standard SQL (Good news is that this isn't by much) and integration with other tools. It also has good information about transaction requirements and ways they are implemented within the context of PostgreSQL, as well as how to increase performance. I gave it four stars out of five only because I thought it could have used more administration details and hints. Though the administration section in the book is still a good read, and it is clearly a topic that can take another book to complete. In short, I highly recommend the book for those wanting to learn more about this open-source database.
Rating: 
Summary: Just what we needed...
Review: We are involved in CF, vb and php projects and needed an alternative to another Oracle license. We turned to PostgreSQL and soon discovered we were making heavy going of the online docs. This book has quickly answered our functional questions, helping us with transactions, sequences etc. So far everything we've needed we've found right away. I wish they were more specific about field max sizes - oracle for example is very clera and very constrained (4k limits on inmserts to varchar fields for example). These limits appear to be arbritarily large as we have tested without overrunning them. ALso we have of course the source files for postgres, so questions like that can be answered with some familiarity with the code. Postgres isn't Oracle and it certainly wont scale like Oracle, but for web projects witha few thousand records and a few dozen simultaneous users it, and this book, are perfect.
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