It's short and not heavy on details, but I found it covers a vast majority of the questions I see people new to postgresql often ask. Once you're done that, as David said, the documentation is very good. You just have to get used to where everything is and know what you're looking for.
John R. Sowden wrote > I have been a foxpro/dos programmer for my small business for about 35 > years. I use linux for all but database stuff. For db I use > foxpro/dosemu. It looks like pg is my best bet for linux/sql. After > reading an o'reilly book on pg (_practical postgresql_), not one word > was mentioned in the procedural language chapter about displaying text. > I write complete applications (in foxpro), not just queries and forms. > > What am I missing here? I am not interested in trying to learn C, C++, > Java, or Perl in order to read sql databases.
Unlike FoxPro, PostgreSQL does not have any kind of user interface development layer built in. PL/pgsql is intended to allow you to process data using procedural logic instead of just a sequence of SQL set-based statements. There is no way to write an entire user application purely with PL/pgsql - the functions you write end up performing specific data manipulation tasks that are glued together by the caller using a more full featured programming language.
The book you chose to read is 12 YEARS old; you will find much is not covered there (or is outright wrong) simply because things have changed considerably in that time period.
You will have to choose a language to develop your application in and then use an appropriate database driver for that language to connect to your PostgreSQL instance. It is quite probable you could even continue using Foxpro and simply connect to PostgreSQL via ODBC.
I would suggest you first read large portions of the current documentation - you will find that few introductory books on PostgreSQL exist because the documentation itself is well written. That is not to say that newer books targeting newcomers do not exist...
