You should have all the learning tools necessary in the docs. I have found only one book so far on Postgres that I liked better than reading the docs... Greg Smith's Postgres 9.0 High Performance (which even now has some outdated info, I hear he's working on an update though), and that isn't a book for learning the basics.
I am also thinking you're connecting to a different server or something similar. Why not give us some actual errors, or explain in more detail what is happening?
