Re: MySQL versus Postgres

On Aug 8, 2010, at 2:45 AM, Torsten Zühlsdorff wrote:

> Scott Frankel schrieb:
>> On Aug 6, 2010, at 6:13 AM, Torsten Zühlsdorff wrote:
>>> John Gage schrieb:
>>>
>>>> On reflection, I think what is needed is a handbook that features
>>>> cut and paste code to do the things with Postgres that people do
>>>> today with MySQL.
>>>
>>> Everyone of my trainees want such thing - for databases, for other
>>> programming-languages etc. It's the worst thing you can give them.
>>> The< will copy, they will paste and they will understand nothing.
>>> Learning is the way to understanding, not copying.
>> I couldn't disagree more.  Presenting working code (at least
>> snippets) should continue to be a fundamental part of any
>> documentation project.
>
> You missunderstand me. Working code is a fundamental part of any
> documentation. But we talk about a handbook with code that works in
> PostgreSQL and does the same thinks in MySQL.
> This way the trainees won't learn how PostgreSQL works, the just
> learn the different examples. Giving them training-problems and the
> PostgreSQL handbook is out of my experience the best way. It tooks
> longer for them to solve the problems, but in this way they are able
> to solve problems, which are not related to the presented examples.

I understand and appreciate your position.  Thanks for the
clarification.

While I believe that this thread has, for all intents and purposes,
run its course (and I look forward to reading the documentation it
informs), I'm going to go out on a limb and present an additional use-
case that may be unpopular, or at least controversial.

There are times when a documentation's audience is not interested in
taking the subject matter to expert level.  (eg:  informed supervisory
or vendor-client relationships, proof of concept development, hobbies,
&c.).  For those cases, "a working understanding" is all that's
strictly necessary.  Annotated, cookbook-style code reference is
especially well suited for that mode of learning.

Regards,
Scott




> Greetings from Germany,
> Torsten
>
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