I’m embarking on a (very cool) project to port an app from SQL Server to Postgres. To this end, I need to get up-to-speed on Postgres stored procs.
I looked around for some good books. Joseph Scott — Postgres champion that he is — recommended a few as well. However, the concensus I found is that the official documentation is the best resource there is, and no book is as good. So I now have a 1,500-page PDF file of the offical Postgres documentation. What do I do with it?
I need it in hardcopy, since the only time I have to read is when I’m away from the compuer. But I don’t relish the idea of carrying around 1,500 8.5 x 11” sheets of paper. I could put them in a three-ring binder, but that’s hardly portable.
I need this documentation in standard trade paperback format. How do you do this? Can commercial printers bound one-off PDFs like this? Is there a better way?
It would be interesting to see if sites like Lulu http://www.lulu.com/ would print a book for you if you're not the author.
A printer (office max etc) should be able to print it and then bind it in sections, so you don't have to carry the whole thing around... say, five booklets with 150 pages each (double sided). They can bind it with a flat spine and a cardstock cover like you're wanting, or spiral binding might work well too. You could also have them punch three holes in the booklets so when you're done you can put them all in one huge binder.
As long as the main pages are black and white, the cost shouldn't be too bad.
If you have access to a Mac OS X machine and a duplex printer, take a look at Cocoa Booklet, a neat little program that will give you a two-up, double-sided PDF that prints out as a little booklet. You could the 1500 page manual in two or three shots so that each booklet would be easy to carry around and handle.
You could also try PrintFu (http://www.printfu.org/) if you haven't found a solution yet.
