>
> On Aug 8, 2010, at 2:45 AM, Torsten Zühlsdorff wrote:
>
*snip*
>
> I understand and appreciate your position. Thanks for the
> clarification.
>
> While I believe that this thread has, for all intents and purposes,
> run its course (and I look forward to reading the documentation it
> informs), I'm going to go out on a limb and present an additional use-
> case that may be unpopular, or at least controversial.
>
> There are times when a documentation's audience is not interested in
> taking the subject matter to expert level. (eg: informed supervisory
> or vendor-client relationships, proof of concept development, hobbies,
> &c.). For those cases, "a working understanding" is all that's
> strictly necessary. Annotated, cookbook-style code reference is
> especially well suited for that mode of learning.
As a recent convert from MySQL (I needed PostGIS) who has also seen the
benefit of Postgresql over MySQL in numerous other areas, that's exactly
what I am doing for myself.
I have 4x6 cards that I write the postgresql way of doing what I use to do
with MySQL so that I can easily reference them when I need to.
Should I sit down and read a book and go through the exercises?
Yes. But I need to get stuff done now, and the cheat sheets I make for
myself let me do just that.
I am not a DBA - I am not even a web developer.
I do both because I can't afford to hire them, and when I have used stuff
created by them, very frequently their code is clearly crap and insecure
and even I can see that, so unless I really want to pay the big bucks,
it's better for me to do it myself and cheat sheets really help.
-----
Michael A. Peters
http://www.shastaherps.org/