It's an odd commentary on the open source movement that, while open source code seems sophisticated and reliable -- as a result of the many hands working on it -- open source documentation, as a general rule, sucks. I believe that this book is the _first_ printed book on PostgreSQL. As such, the author is to be commended for his effort at collecting a great deal of useful Postgres info in one place, helping readers find the essential knowledge buried in the sea of online documentation.
The book's title says "Introduction and Concepts", letting you know this isn't an advanced treatise on Postgres. The first half of the book handily summarizes SQL and then dives into hands-on PostgreSQL, run interactively via the psql interactive utility. This is a nice way to give readers direct experience with Postgres, but it is also automatically limiting because readers never learn how to use Postgres in the context of an application. There is a chapter on programming interfaces, but it covers ten languages in ten pages, which isn't enough to impart any practical Postgres programming skills.
The second half of the book is a verbatim replica of the SQL Commands reference from the official Postgres user's guide. It's handy to have in the book, but it's hard to give the author any credit for simply pouring this stuff into his book unchanged. I would have liked to see some useful annotations from the author, reflecting his obviously considerable experience with Postgres.
I gave the book four stars in part because the author is breaking new ground by carving out a niche with publishers for future PostgreSQL books. I'm hoping a second edition of his book comes soon, replacing (or augmenting) those 250 pages of reference material with concrete programming examples in a variety of languages and interesting comments on usage. In the meantime, this book is a very nice primer for our new employees who have to come up to speed on PostgreSQL quickly.
