Books & Resources on using PostgreSQL?

Question

I'm from an Oracle background, and with each release there are plenty of excellent books on using Oracle as a database. I've found several good MySQL books as well, but I have no idea which of the PostgreSQL books or resources is good and up-to-date. With an upcoming 9.0 release, what are your recommendations?

Answer 1

http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/PostgreSQL_Tutorials

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/books/

And ofcourse the fine manual: http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/

Answer 2

The PostgreSQL manual is excellent, and the 9.0 version is already up. The official wiki has plenty of good articles on it too. But all of the PostgreSQL books currently on the market are quite out of date at this point, all >5 years old (in English at least--there's a 2008 German book from Bernd Helmle I can't read myself).

Two books covering up to PostgreSQL 9.0, including up to the last commit details about the major new features included in it, are due to be released shortly after that upcoming new version ships (which is currently scheduled for a few days from now). PostgreSQL 9.0 High Performance is my book, it covers versions 8.1 through 9.0 and is due in October. And PostgreSQL 9 Administration Cookbook is coming from the same publisher shortly afterwards. We've tried to keep the overlap to the necessary minimum, so both should be useful in their own way if people buy both.

I'm not aware of anyone else working on new PostgreSQL books at this time; it really is tough to compete with the manual. One of the things that our books get into that the manual doesn't is what the right add-on tools you probably need are. That's an area it's easy to get lost in when new to the database. PostgreSQL is a core database, not a complete application development and monitoring infrastructure. It can be hard for a newcomer to sift the good add-on projects from the bad though.

Answer 3

You didn't mention the language the book should be written in. There are two up-to-date (covering 8.4) PostgreSQL books written in German, which are quite good:

• "PostgreSQL. Datenbankpraxis für Anwender, Administratoren und Entwickler" from Andreas Scheerbaum
• "PostgreSQL-Administration", from Peter Eisentraut