I spent years in all sorts of ORMs and have sworn off them in favor of pure-SQL patterns like yesql (for Clojure) and massive-js (for Node.js). For me, the boilerplate of writing SQL queries is trivial compared to the productivity and performance inefficiencies of trying to understand and work around the magic of ORMs. Writing pure queries also encourages good practices like writing field lists in your SELECT statements and using more of Postgres' built-in functions.

The book covers some theory when it's needed and comes with lots of practical examples, all using real world data sets to make them easier to understand and relate to.

Using an ORM and how to best integrate “raw SQL” in your code is also discussed, and data modelling gets its own chapter too. I think you will like it!

Is it aimed at developers from ground 0, or someone with 10+ years of experience?

I've been working with both raw SQL and ORMs for a pretty long time. I'm definitely not at the DBA-tier and really complex queries scare the shit out of me but I haven't ever hit a complete roadblock when it came to modeling and querying data in a reasonably efficient way.

With that said, an ideal book for me would be one that just showed 100+ real world data modeling examples and how to query it in a bunch of real ways. Ideally an expert's thought process would be explained every step of the way. It'd happily pay $100+ for that just because I'm sure using it as a reference guide would save me enough hours in dev time to make it worth it.

You know what? Just buy the book and if you don't like it, tell me. I'll refund you. My guess is that you will like it ;-)

I have used PostgreSQL for 12 years. Early on I tried a few ORMs and I found them to be just something else to learn. If I had any issues, I had to figure out how it was all working on the SQL back end anyway.

My recommendation is to just directly learn SQL instead.

That's a good question. I don't use an ORM, but you do, so that tells us that 50% of developers use an ORM ;-)

Does anyone have any stats on what percentage of developers use an ORM?

IMO an ORM is not a substitute for knowing SQL, much less studying the actual database.

To me, an ORM is a tool that allows someone that knows SQL to write statements they would write by hand using business-level vocabulary.

Also, you have to be savvy enough to know when you are hitting the max expressiveness of the ORM and need some powerful SQL you better write by hand. Active Record certainly provides API for that, and it is an API you are supposed to leverage when the circumstance arises (Rails team over here).