Forum OpenACS Q&A: O'Reilly planning PostgreSQL book

Posted by Tim The Evil on 08/20/01 08:43 PM

Heya... every so often I poke around on O'Reilly's site to see if there is a book coming out which would make my job easier (eg. Server Load Balancing very recently). I'm not sure if I'll buy a copy, but they are planning to release a Postgresql book soon enough, perhaps the authors can be influenced to include some important Free projects 😉.

http://www.oreilly. com/catalog/ppostgresql/

Postgres has served me VERY well lately -- Fox News, CNN, C-SPAN, and NBC all buy live video feeds from an application that I wrote with Postgres, PHP, and Perl's XML parsing libraries on a Sunday afternoon. (They love it because it's fast and I can quickly implement whatever changes they like) Meanwhile we use OpenACS for some forms of managed hosting and are migrating some of our delivery/content management process to it as 4.0 takes shape, since it makes all our lives easier.

Thanks everyone who is involved for a great piece of work; I have to start back-contributing patches to things like Thoth and OpenACS, but I worry that my patches are so crufty they're almost worse than nothing at all. Eccch.

2: Response to O'Reilly planning PostgreSQL book (response to 1)

Posted by Roberto Mello on 08/21/01 12:29 AM

Maybe O'Reilly will wake up now and shove their LAMP crap. It's nice that they are releasing a book. They are a little late though. There are several PostgreSQL books coming into the market nowadays.

3: Response to O'Reilly planning PostgreSQL book (response to 1)

Posted by Roberto Mello on 08/21/01 12:30 AM

BTW Tim, don't be afraid to send patches. Keep'em coming. A patch in hand is better than two intentions in the keyboard.

4: Response to O'Reilly planning PostgreSQL book (response to 1)

Posted by Talli Somekh on 08/21/01 12:32 AM

O'reilly bought the book from another publisher, whose name I forget. The old book used to be called "PostgreSQL: The Elephant Never Forgets".

I believe O'Reilly's purchase has delayed the book's release by a couple of months. Perhaps to get it up to O'Reilly's standards since some reviews of the book have said it's not so great.

talli

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Posted by good bye on 08/21/01 07:39 AM

<i>. Perhaps to get it up to O'Reilly's standards since some
reviews of the book have said it's not so great. </i>
<p>
oreilly's "standards?" please add smileys to ironic comments,
as it is sometimes difficult to discern tongue-in-cheek on web
forums. 😉
<p>
(maybe there is some O'Reilly book I've missed? I gave up on
that publisher after trying to obtain some useful information from
their utterly awful internet security book...)

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Posted by mark dalrymple on 08/21/01 03:22 PM

heh. O'Reilly can be hit-and-miss. I've found their 'intro to subject' books to be uniformly good (Java in a nutcase, learning xml, the perl and regexp books). Their "more advanced books" have been hit and miss (e.g. Java Performance Tuning is awesome. The servlet programming one is not good). Their Oracle books are either dry as toast (all the PL/SQL books) or flat-out atrocious (Their DBA book). I tend to judge the quality of an O'Reilly book by the size of its type. Too big == fluff, too small == dense and tedious.

7: Response to O'Reilly planning PostgreSQL book (response to 1)

Posted by Roberto Mello on 08/21/01 04:49 PM

I liked Running Linux, Learning Java, the Camel Book (Perl), Programming Python and 'Python Standard Library'. I haven't finished the Python books yet, but Programming Python is a good book, but it's very big (> 1300 pages!).

Some O'Reilly books that I've seen are like what Mark described. I usually go to the university bookstore and flip through the O'Reilly zoo they have there before buying one of their books.

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Posted by Marc Spitzer on 08/21/01 09:01 PM

Their older books were the first technical books I would buy on O'Reilly's reputation as a publisher and I was seldom if ever wrong. But things have changed, O'Reilly has grown and there target market is now the mass market from what I can see. So the few customers they loose on the drop in quality they more then make up for with volume. Now I feel that most of their new books are not writen by smart people or for smart people.

9: Response to O'Reilly planning PostgreSQL book (response to 1)

Posted by Rodger Donaldson on 08/22/01 04:04 AM

The cricket book's great (DNS & BIND); but I agree, ORA seem to have
gone from a tight focus on quality products to shipping books on any
old crap. Their prices have gone up, too. They're no longer the
automatic buy they used to be for me.

(And I find some of Tim O'Rielly's grandstanding as a self-described
leader of free software as almost as irksome as Eric S Raymond's...)