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A Curious Moon
373 pages, Unknown Binding
Published January 14, 2018
14 people are currently reading
148 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
June 16, 2022
Slightly disappointing. The beginning of the book was very promising, with loading messy data into Postgres, making everything repeatable using makefiles and idempotent SQL scripts... but then at some point it feels like the protagonist just abandons these good ideas and starts slapping things together. I feel the book also could've been made quite a bit more educational with some explicit exercises for the reader.
I also wasn't a huge fan of the "use Postgres for everything, don't even think about using anything else" manifest that comes about two-thirds of the way through the book and the repeated "using javascript is a fireable offense" attitude. Postgres is a fantastic piece of software and JS is rarely the best language to pick (except when it is), but I don't think our industry is in particular need of even more dogma/religion/cultism/whatever you want to call it. Right tool for the job.
The book was overall pretty fun to read, but I expected to learn more than just a few nuggets here and there from a book of this length.
I also wasn't a huge fan of the "use Postgres for everything, don't even think about using anything else" manifest that comes about two-thirds of the way through the book and the repeated "using javascript is a fireable offense" attitude. Postgres is a fantastic piece of software and JS is rarely the best language to pick (except when it is), but I don't think our industry is in particular need of even more dogma/religion/cultism/whatever you want to call it. Right tool for the job.
The book was overall pretty fun to read, but I expected to learn more than just a few nuggets here and there from a book of this length.
August 3, 2019
The book is mix of technical writing and fiction, interesting writing style. Has a lot of things related to real-world development/working in IT company, which is funny. Regarding tech stuff it explains some basics of Postgres, but no advanced stuff. M.Sullivan trick was surprising.
Would recommend to SQL analysts, but not developers.
Would recommend to SQL analysts, but not developers.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
August 15, 2021
This book was a huge disappointment, and I had such high expectations. The premise is so promising: a fictional story, using real data (NASA Cassini mission), and learning SQL and Postgres.
I started this book and the Coursera course PostgreSQL for Everybody at the same time in May. It was not possible to do them both, so I continued with the Coursera course, and started again with the book at the end of July.
Instead of experiencing the emotions that I associate with learning something new, like enthusiasm, joy, amazement and understanding, I became increasingly bewildered and frustrated during the past 2 weeks. Why doesn't the code work (*)? What am I doing wrong (**)? Why don't our dates match (***)? Will I be able to continue (****)? What is she doing (*****)? ...
*: Copy pasting the code from the accompanying files resulted in weird errors. It took me a while to figure out that the indentation of the code uses a character that is neither a space or a tab. Instead of the columname "field", you got " field" which broke the import statement.
**: I copy pasted the import statement from the book and got a lot more inserted rows than mentioned in the book.
***: When I compared the result of a select statement, I noticed that the dates were a couple of hours off, resulting a different dates. It probably has something to do that I am in Europe and the author is in America. Will this affect the results in the rest of the book?
****: The book doesn't mention any system requirements. I started installing a PostgreSQL server (Ubuntu) on a Raspberry Pi 3 with a 16 GB SD. That was not enough, so I switched to a Raspberry Pi 4B with a 32 GB SD, but it looks like that won't be enough either.
*****: The protagonist studies a lot in her spare time, which she doesn't always mention in her journal (the book). I always had the feeling like I needed to catch up. How much time do I need to spend reading the PostgreSQL documentation? Will I make any progress in the book today? Do I really need to read the documentation at NASA to understand what she is doing and why?
I took notes and came across some new SQL statements and interesting PostgreSQL features, which I can look up now that I have the time.
When in doubt, choose the Coursera course.
I started this book and the Coursera course PostgreSQL for Everybody at the same time in May. It was not possible to do them both, so I continued with the Coursera course, and started again with the book at the end of July.
Instead of experiencing the emotions that I associate with learning something new, like enthusiasm, joy, amazement and understanding, I became increasingly bewildered and frustrated during the past 2 weeks. Why doesn't the code work (*)? What am I doing wrong (**)? Why don't our dates match (***)? Will I be able to continue (****)? What is she doing (*****)? ...
*: Copy pasting the code from the accompanying files resulted in weird errors. It took me a while to figure out that the indentation of the code uses a character that is neither a space or a tab. Instead of the columname "field", you got " field" which broke the import statement.
**: I copy pasted the import statement from the book and got a lot more inserted rows than mentioned in the book.
***: When I compared the result of a select statement, I noticed that the dates were a couple of hours off, resulting a different dates. It probably has something to do that I am in Europe and the author is in America. Will this affect the results in the rest of the book?
****: The book doesn't mention any system requirements. I started installing a PostgreSQL server (Ubuntu) on a Raspberry Pi 3 with a 16 GB SD. That was not enough, so I switched to a Raspberry Pi 4B with a 32 GB SD, but it looks like that won't be enough either.
*****: The protagonist studies a lot in her spare time, which she doesn't always mention in her journal (the book). I always had the feeling like I needed to catch up. How much time do I need to spend reading the PostgreSQL documentation? Will I make any progress in the book today? Do I really need to read the documentation at NASA to understand what she is doing and why?
I took notes and came across some new SQL statements and interesting PostgreSQL features, which I can look up now that I have the time.
When in doubt, choose the Coursera course.
November 2, 2020
Loved the book. I really like the idea of weaving a narrative as a teaching tool and the evolution of the protagonist as they level up in their endeavour makes it quite inspiring and you want to download and play with the data.
This was one of those books that I thoroughly enjoyed to the extent of reading the whole thing from start to finish in one go with a firm intent of re-reading it several times.
This was one of those books that I thoroughly enjoyed to the extent of reading the whole thing from start to finish in one go with a firm intent of re-reading it several times.
July 7, 2019
I was a bit disappointed with the book.
I expected it too contain more of sqls and less of moons.
I expected it too contain more of sqls and less of moons.
January 6, 2019
This book was not what I was expecting. I enjoyed Dee's (main character) writing style, but I missed detail that was dropped off. I learned a few things about PostGres and enjoyed pushing myself back into Linux world. I was a bit disappointed that Dee did not follow the original guidance of making sure everything she did was repeatable. I felt like at some point in the book Dee went into hap-hazzard working mode.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
July 3, 2023
A nice read if you like space science. You'll learn a bunch of fascinating things about the Cassini mission and how Enceladus went from "yet another moon" to "holy shit, this tiny moon will change planetary science!". This books is however not recommended if you're looking to improve your sql/postgres-fu.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews