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Comment by mintyfresh | Hacker News Reader

In that spirit, what are the best resources for getting started and diving in to working with PostgreSQL?

Postgresql documentation is terrific, really [1]. Then you can also use pgsql wiki [2]. Other useful resources are the searchable mailing lists archive [3]. Have a look also to pgcon.org web site, it's fully packed of presentation material (mainly pdf slides) gathered since 2007, just to give you an example look at Tom Lane's "http://www.pgcon.org/2011/schedule/events/350.en.html [4]

Speaking of books a few of the best I'm aware of are:

- PostgreSQL 9 Admin Cookbook (Simon Riggs, Hannu Krosing)

- PostgreSQL 9.0 High Performance (Gregory Smith)

- Instant PostgreSQL Backup and Restore How-to (Shaun M. Thomas)

all them from Packt Publishing

[1] http://www.postgresql.org/docs/devel/static/

[2] http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Main_Page

[3] http://www.postgresql.org/list/

[4] http://www.pgcon.org/2011/schedule/events/350.en.html

Awesome. Thank you for putting this together. It looks like the consensus is the PostgreSQL documentation.

The docs really are great. I once downloaded the whole lot as a PDF and read it from the beginning on my phone during downtime (like 15 mins on the train). Read all the way through to the parts that discuss internals then stopped. I now appreciate it as a relational database, not just as a storage backend.

Great idea, you've inspired me to do the same just now. I've been using PostgreSQL since ~2000 and love it, but I'm still finding new little corners of the docs worth reading.

If anyone else wants to do this and has Calibre installed, the commandline ebook-convert utility does a decent job. Change to the postgresql docs directory and then run

  ebook-convert html/index.html postgresql_docs.mobi --authors="Postgresql" --title="Postgresql 9.2 Documentation"

(or substitute postgresql_docs.epub). There are a lot of tweaks that'd make it better, but it's readable and properly handles the code font, etc. If you want much more than that using the Calibre gui might be a good idea. Biggest issue I'm seeing is that "Up" links & such are broken, so I'm working on that now.

The postgresql.org docs are a great starting point: http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.1/static/ for example. (They also serve as a good reference when you're forgetting some finer point of syntax or admin later... the manual's nicely "phased" in terms of introductory and reference content.)

I'm lucky enough to work at a company that tends to use Pg as our default RDBMS; speaking strictly as a dev it's a heck of a lot more ergonomic and sophisticated than some of the things I've dealt with.

As far as open source documentation goes, I consider Postgres to easily be the standard. The official docs are so good that a book writer would have to try hard just to not plagiarize them, let alone surpass their content.

I'd love to hear about them too. I've seen some O'Reilly books but they've been long time ago.

There is a really old O'Reilly book, I think, but there is also an O'Reilly book called "PostgreSQL: Up and Running" that came out last year that covers 9.2.

I just finished with it. It's actually quite good to get you started with Postgres. Besides installing and command line usage it introduces many Postgres features and how they differ from MySQL, Oracle and the like.

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