The intro to Part III says "The first few chapters are written so they can be 
understood without prerequisite knowledge, so new users who need to set up 
their own server can begin their exploration with this part." With that in 
mind, could chapters on installation and chapters 18 & 19 be made more 
novice-friendly?

For example, consider adding a brief chapter before chapter 16 on installation 
in general, explaining the options in general, the pros and cons of each, and a 
link to https://www.postgresql.org/download/. Or add those things to Section 
1.1 in part I . It says "If you are installing PostgreSQL yourself, then refer 
to Chapter 16<https://www.postgresql.org/docs/12/installation.html> for 
instructions on installation", but chapter 16 is only really about installation 
from source code.

The intro to chapter 16 also states "If you are building PostgreSQL for 
Microsoft Windows, read this chapter if you intend to build with MinGW or 
Cygwin; but if you intend to build with Microsoft's Visual C++, see Chapter 
17<https://www.postgresql.org/docs/12/install-windows.html> instead." A novice 
might infer from that that those are the only 2 options, rather than knowing 
about the much-easier-to-install binary version. Another example is at the top 
18.1. It would be nice to have a brief explanation what a server daemon is, or 
if nothing else, a link to the Wikipedia article.

It would be great to make these chapters more friendly to PostgreSQL novices 
who are Windows users. Windows (for non-developers) doesn't use the concept of 
file ownership, and uses "user account" differently, so explanations of those 
would be helpful. The second paragraph begins "To add a Unix user account to 
your system", but nothing about Windows or macOS (I think many Mac users do not 
know it is based on UNIX). In the first paragraph of 18.2 talks about 
initializing a storage area, but "initializing" is not a term regularly used by 
Windows users. In the third sentence of the second paragraph it would be 
helpful to either add a Windows example, or at least say something like "There 
is no default, although in UNIX popular locations include /usr/local/pgsql/data 
and /var/lib/pgsql/data." (Related, it would also be nice in section 3 of the 
preface to note that most commands in the manual are given in UNIX, and that in 
Windows you would use backslashes rather than forward slashes in, for example, 
path names.) While 18.3 has specific content for 5 UNIX varieties, there is no 
specific content for Windows.

I am happy to help develop solutions for any of the comments I send out.

Paul

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