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Question about Lockhart's book

От
Christian Convey
Дата:
Hi guys,

I'm starting to poke around the internals of Postgres.  Does anyone know the extent to which Thomas Lockhart's book, "PostgresSQL Programmer's Guide" is accurate with respect to the current state of the code base?

Thanks,
Christian

Re: Question about Lockhart's book

От
Andrew Dunstan
Дата:
On 12/27/2013 10:55 AM, Christian Convey wrote:
> Hi guys,
>
> I'm starting to poke around the internals of Postgres.  Does anyone 
> know the extent to which Thomas Lockhart's book, "PostgresSQL 
> Programmer's Guide" is accurate with respect to the current state of 
> the code base?
>
>

Umm, that book was published in 2000, from what I can see on Amazon. 
Would you use a book published 13 years ago to educate yourself on, say, 
the Linux code base? 13 years is an eternity in this business.

cheers

andrew




Re: Question about Lockhart's book

От
Christian Convey
Дата:
Hi Andrew, 

Thanks for your response.  Sometimes overall software architectures stay (mostly) unchanged for a long time, and so I figured that's possibly the case for Postgresql as well.  But I didn't know, which is why I asked. 

Kind regards,
Christian


On Fri, Dec 27, 2013 at 11:11 AM, Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.net> wrote:

On 12/27/2013 10:55 AM, Christian Convey wrote:
Hi guys,

I'm starting to poke around the internals of Postgres.  Does anyone know the extent to which Thomas Lockhart's book, "PostgresSQL Programmer's Guide" is accurate with respect to the current state of the code base?



Umm, that book was published in 2000, from what I can see on Amazon. Would you use a book published 13 years ago to educate yourself on, say, the Linux code base? 13 years is an eternity in this business.

cheers

andrew


Re: Question about Lockhart's book

От
Josh Berkus
Дата:
On 12/27/2013 08:14 AM, Christian Convey wrote:
> Hi Andrew,
> 
> Thanks for your response.  Sometimes overall software architectures stay
> (mostly) unchanged for a long time, and so I figured that's possibly the
> case for Postgresql as well.  But I didn't know, which is why I asked.

Some things in that book will still be accurate and informative.  The
problem is that you, as a beginner, won't know which things are still
good and which are obsolete.

I'd suggest:

- Developer documentation in our primary docs
- Developer FAQ on the wiki
- Bruce's presentations on various internals
- Tom's presentations on how the query planner works
- Various other people's presentations on other aspects, such as foreign
data wrappers, event triggers, etc.

Unfortunately, there's no central index of presentations.

I'm a big fan of "learn by doing", and here's a program which would
bring you up on a LOT of PostgreSQL:

1. Write a few of your own C functions, including trigger functions and
an operator.

2. Write your own foreign data wrapper for something.

3. Write your own Type, including input/output functions, stats
estimation and custom indexing.

-- 
Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL Experts Inc.
http://pgexperts.com



Re: Question about Lockhart's book

От
Christian Convey
Дата:
Thanks very much Josh.  Those sound like great ideas - I'll try to give them a shot. 


On Fri, Dec 27, 2013 at 1:52 PM, Josh Berkus <josh@agliodbs.com> wrote:
On 12/27/2013 08:14 AM, Christian Convey wrote:
> Hi Andrew,
>
> Thanks for your response.  Sometimes overall software architectures stay
> (mostly) unchanged for a long time, and so I figured that's possibly the
> case for Postgresql as well.  But I didn't know, which is why I asked.

Some things in that book will still be accurate and informative.  The
problem is that you, as a beginner, won't know which things are still
good and which are obsolete.

I'd suggest:

- Developer documentation in our primary docs
- Developer FAQ on the wiki
- Bruce's presentations on various internals
- Tom's presentations on how the query planner works
- Various other people's presentations on other aspects, such as foreign
data wrappers, event triggers, etc.

Unfortunately, there's no central index of presentations.

I'm a big fan of "learn by doing", and here's a program which would
bring you up on a LOT of PostgreSQL:

1. Write a few of your own C functions, including trigger functions and
an operator.

2. Write your own foreign data wrapper for something.

3. Write your own Type, including input/output functions, stats
estimation and custom indexing.

--
Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL Experts Inc.
http://pgexperts.com


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Re: Question about Lockhart's book

От
Peter Eisentraut
Дата:
On 12/27/13, 11:14 AM, Christian Convey wrote:
> Thanks for your response.  Sometimes overall software architectures stay
> (mostly) unchanged for a long time, and so I figured that's possibly the
> case for Postgresql as well.  But I didn't know, which is why I asked. 

That book is actually snapshot of part of the PostgreSQL documentation
at that time.  It's not a software architecture book.