The Art of PostgreSQL

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1. andersmurphyApr 2026
   Not specific books per say. Though I'd advise starting with some constraints. As that really helps you focus.

   Your reading/learning material can spin out of those constraints.

   So for me my recent constraints were:

   1. Multiplayer/collaborative web apps built by small teams.

   2. Single box.

   3. I like writing lisp.

   So single box pushes me towards a faster language, and something that's easy to deploy. Go would be the natural choice here, but I want a lisp so Clojure is probably the best option here (helps that I already know it). JVM is fast enough and has a pretty good deployment story. Multiplayer web apps, pushed me to explore distributed state vs streaming with centralised state. This became a whole journey which ended with Datastar [1]. Thing is immediate mode streaming HTML needs your database queries to be fast and that's how I ended up on SQLite (I was already a fan, and had used it in production before), but the constraints of streaming HTML forced me to revisit it in anger.

   Your constraints could be completely different. They could be:

   1. Fast to market.

   2. Minimise risk.

   3. Mobile + Web

   4. Try something new.

   Fast to market might mean you go with something like Rails/Django. Minimise risk might mean you go with Rails because you have a load of experience with it. Mobile + web means you read up on Hotwire. Try something new might mean you push more logic into stored procedures and SQL queries so you can get the most out of Postgres and make your Rails app faster. So you read The Art of Postgresql [2] (great book). Or maybe you try hosting rails on a VPS and set up/manage your own postgres instance.

   A few companies back mine were:

   1. JVM but with a more ruby/rails like development experience.

   2. Mobile but not separate iOS/Android projects.

   3. Avoid the pain of app store releases.

   4. You can't innovate everywhere.

   That meant Clojure. React native. Minimal clients with as much driven from the backend as possible. Sticking to postgres and Heroku because it's what we knew and worked well enough.

   - [1] https://data-star.dev

   - [2] https://theartofpostgresql.com

   There's no right answer. Hope that's helpful.

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2. irarelycommentOct 2025
   This is great read with examples of running some business logic on the database: https://theartofpostgresql.com/
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3. VWWHFSfQFeb 2025
   This is a great book that explains PG in a step-by-step way. I learned a ton from it

   https://theartofpostgresql.com/

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4. seerSep 2024
   this is what inspired me to look more into postgres’ features - https://theartofpostgresql.com/

   quite a lot of ideas what you can do with it.

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5. rahimnathwaniMar 2024
   The best I've seen is The Art of PostgreSQL: https://theartofpostgresql.com/
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6. argulaneNov 2023
   I bought https://theartofpostgresql.com/ few years a go. It goes more into intermediate/advanced category and I have been quite happy with it.

   I was fortunate to have a Database Basics course in the university that was 80% database schema design and 20% SQL queries and indexes. Reasoning for such a split was that fixing a bad database schema is much harder than fixing bad queries.

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