Hacker News Reader

Comment by nickpeterson | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone recommend a decently up to date book on postgres administration? Or are docs really the only way? I've used SQL Server for years but would likely choose postgres for an independent project if I intended to commercialize it. That said, I don't use it at work so it's hard to get in depth experience.

View on HN

I'm not familiar with any books, but the docs really are excellent and have various sections for beginners and getting to know the system.

A good way in is to look at external tools like barman which manage dumps+streaming replication along with point-in-time restoration automatically for you rather than manually invoking all the stuff directly.

Mostly, postgres just works.

There are no better docs than Postgres docs.

I understand your need for a book. I prefer to read a book when diving into a new tech. That being said, when I started out using PostgreSQL years back, there were only online docs, and I must say they are although lengthy at time, very good.

Also, pgAdmin?

There's PostgreSQL 9 Admin Cookbook from Simon Riggs, for example (disclosure: I work for Simon).

Packt has several other good books about PostgreSQL, but always check the author - they started publishing books authored by people entirely unknown in the community, that are "inspired" by book published before (you might also use "plagiarism" instead).

Yeah packtpub is a real crapshoot. They're great in that they'll seemingly publish whatever tech subject you want to write about. The downside is they publish anything...

Yeah, although there's a difference between "publishing whatever" and "publishing books that copy from other books".

Ultimately it's not the publisher but the author that matters, I guess.

I just remembered there's also "PostgreSQL: Up and Running" published by O'Reilly. It deals with more stuff than just administration, but Regina O. Obe and Leo S. Hsu are good authors.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com