I am going to buy the book for two reasons.One for its content and Two to somehow thank Dimitri Fontain for all his work on Postgres. He is one of the main Postgresql contributors.
Looked at the website and didn't really get much of a feel for what was actually in the book.<p>I will say though, having a good knowledge of SQL (we use Postgres where I work) can help you do some really neat things.<p>There are probably three or four large new features I've added to our system in the past couple years that have boiled down to "Pre-process the input and then ask Postgres for the answer"<p>Databases are very powerful. They are even more powerful when you know how to use them right.
I'm a web developer (React / Node.js) and I bought the first edition of this book (it was called Mastering PostgreSQL in Application Development then). I can say that it really changed the way I approach building apps. I definitely lean on the database <i>a lot</i> more now. No more "models", ORMs / query builders, and crunching data in app code. Just build your schema, write plain sql queries, and you're off to the races. As a bonus, I'm also much more comfortable with Postgres' built in command line tool, psql.<p>The scope of the book is pretty broad. You'll cover psql setup, a little relational theory, some nuts and bolts about the inner workings of Postgres, indexing strategy, data types, aggregates, window functions, common table expressions, etc. Given the scope, it's difficult to cover everything in depth, so I'd treat this book as more of an introduction to what's possible.<p>Highly recommended.
Anybody know if this book touches on the more recent features added into Postgresql for Full-Text Search? Hard to tell what's in the contents. Seems like a great resource though.
Don't use PostgreSQL or MySQL/MariaDB for analytic work - they're super-slow at that. Try systems like MonetDB, ClickHouse (not a full DBMS) etc:
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_column-oriented_DBMSes" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_column-oriented_DBMSes</a>
Column stores are where it's at.<p>(Not relevant if you need to process transactions.)