Re: [ANNOUNCE] PostgreSQL book completed though chapter 10

On Fri, 31 Mar 2000, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> I have completed the first draft of my book through chapter 10.
>

Bruce, it's looking very nice!

Just browsing the TOC though, a couple of things struck me as odd/missing and
if I were reviewing the book when finished I'd query these!

First the pitch of the book seems a bit mixed. There is a lot of
introductionary material on how to create a table, joins etc. inthe early
chapters, but the book also covers quite advanced topics like user-defined
functions. The reader is either going to skip the early chapters, or get lost
in the later ones. If you really do want to cover such a broad spectrum, what
about splitting the book into Part I - Introducing RDBMS and Part II - Using
PostgreSQL (or something similar)

Information on primary/foreign key constraints only appeared under the
'Joining Tables' chapter - I don't know how complete this chapter is, but the
terms were defined with no suggestions about creating tables using these terms
or using other constraints.

I could see nothing about the object-relational features in terms of creating
tables, etc.

I would really like to see a PostgreSQL SQL reference as well - this I guess
would be taken largely from the man pages.

In summary, I like the style and the contents as far as it goes, but I think
there are some important things missing (judging from the TOC) and personally I
feel the organisation is a little odd.

Hope you feel these comments have been useful.

Best wishes,

Andrew

--
Dr. Andrew C.R. Martin EMail: a(dot)c(dot)r(dot)martin(at)reading(dot)ac(dot)uk (work)
Lecturer in Bioinformatics andrew(at)stagleys(dot)demon(dot)co(dot)uk (home)
University of Reading
Tel.: +44 (0)118 987 5123x7022 Fax: +44 (0)118 931 0180