The PostgreSQL manual [1] is an incredible resource. The first 100 or so pages give you a lay of the land. If you read those you will be lightyears ahead of the average web dev. After that you can dig into other chapters/topics that interest you.

[1] https://www.postgresql.org/docs/manuals/

I always appreciated that Postgresql documents their differences from standard SQL. When I want to know the standard way I often revisit their documents, in addition to those of the database I'm using.

Even though I've never sat down and read it, I can say with confidence that the Postgres manual is one of the most impressive manuals I've ever seen. They could have published the manual as 2 books, and I would have paid money to read them.

I highly recommend the Arch Wiki as well. It is the best of its kind, there is.

That too is 95% generic - https://wiki.archlinux.org/

They published it as 3 books. Or, a third party did.

The more you know! It looks like they published the v9.0 reference manual in late 2010.

In case anyone is curious, you can order them here:

* Volume 1A - http://www.network-theory.co.uk/postgresql9/vol1a/

* Volume 1B - http://www.network-theory.co.uk/postgresql9/vol1b/

* Volume 2 - http://www.network-theory.co.uk/postgresql9/vol2/

* Volume 3 - http://www.network-theory.co.uk/postgresql9/vol3/

Replying to save, this is very useful on first pass.

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If you're looking to learn a mental model of the internals, a coworker has pointed me at http://www.interdb.jp/pg/ and it's pretty good.

That's the spirit. Don't think about tuning the config, stock AWS RDS instances will give you all the things you need 99% of the time