HACKER Q&A
📣 thisisbrians

Good Postgres Book(s)?


Hi HN,

As I've matured as a software engineer, I've focused more and more on taking full advantage of the database to alleviate burdens at the application layer, which has paid massive dividends thus far. The features available in Postgres continue to astonish me, especially when paired with PostgREST [1] (which I can highly recommend). Constraints, triggers, stored procedures, permissions, materialized views [2], and other features have saved my team and I thousands of lines of application code (and the inevitable bugs therein), and even allowed us to forgo standing up and managing entire services (cache, queue, timeseries db [3] etc.). SQL (and especially PLSQL [4]) can be annoying/obtuse (and need much better tooling, IMO), but so far the benefits have far outweighed the costs.

In that spirit, what books or other resources would you folks recommend to level up my team's knowledge of Postgres features and administration? Or any cool tips/tricks you have put into place that you want to share? There was some discussion in a thread [5] on the front page a few days ago, but I wanted to take the opportunity to resurface this part of conversation directly.

Thanks!

— Brian

1. https://postgrest.org/

2. https://spin.atomicobject.com/2018/04/09/postgres-materialized-views/

3. https://www.timescale.com/

4. https://www.postgresql.org/docs/12/plpgsql-overview.html

5. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28077434


  👤 jrjsmrtn Accepted Answer ✓
The Art of PostgreSQL (https://theartofpostgresql.com) by Dimitri Fontaine, also the author of PGLoader (https://github.com/dimitri/pgloader)