Re: Question about Lockhart's book

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