Question about Lockhart's book

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

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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 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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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 12/27/13, 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.

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