Luca Ferrari is the author of the book Learn PostgreSQL and PostgreSQL 11 Server Side Programming Quick Start Guide. We got the chance to sit down with him and find out more about his experience of writing with Packt.
Q: How long did it take you to write the book?
Luca: The longest period was to “imagine” the book and its content, then it took me a few months, 4-5, to write it down.
Q: What kind of research did you do, and how long did you spend researching before beginning the book?
Luca: Luckily I did know the subject enough well, so I did not have to spend much time in doing research. Nevertheless, during the writing of every single chapter I had to do some research with the official documentation in order to be sure of some settings and configurations I did not apply very often.
Q: Did you face any challenges during the writing process? How did you overcome them?
Luca: I suffer from eyes problem and have difficulties in seeing, therefore writing a book is a very hard challenge to me. I decided to write the main of the content using GNU Emacs because it is an environment I feel comfortable and productive with, then copying the result into the platform used for the official editing.
Q: What advice would you give to readers learning tech? Do you have any top tips?
Luca: I try to read as much technical books as I can, and I impose myself to read one book at time from the very beginning to the very end. This enforces discipline and provides me a good background for new knowledge and ideas, and I suggest anyone else to do the same.
Q. How do you keep up-to-date on your tech?
Luca: Books are the main part of my knowledge because I spend many time in train, besides I do listen to podcasts and conference talks, and of course I like reading news on planets and aggregators.
Q. Do you have a blog that readers can follow?
Luca: https://fluca1978.github.io
Q. Can you share any blogs, websites and forums to help readers gain a holistic view of the tech they are learning?
Luca: I don’t like silver bullets, therefore with regard to PostgreSQL the mailing lists are the most comfortable and usable way to get help, see https://www.postgresql.org/list/. Depending on the technology you are learning, the first thing to do is to discover the way the community communicates by, that’s the only right way to get help.
You can find Luca’s book on Amazon by following the link’s below the cover image:
