The project that I am working on finally got the requirements that allowed us to pick a database. Over the last few years I have been using MongoDb as the lazy choice for storage. The project makes more sense to use a relational database so I have returned to Postgres.
This has encouraged me to reread this book. I am planning on adding some details in these notes to add modern practices to the book.
To start with the book predates containers so all of the chapters require you to install the database on your machine. I am not encouraging you to use a database in a container for production. It does however allow you to test drive database code.
Over the last decade all of the big databases I have used have been cloud hosted. For a JVM based application we used hsqldb as an embedded replacement for the database in tests.
The book also fails to mention database migrations. This is a technique that allows you to version control the schema of a database.
Coming back to Postgres after years of Mongo makes me realize that you need to work a little harder to get data to and from the store. On the other hand SQL is far easier to make aggregate queries with compared to Postgres. It is easier to enforce constraints in SQL. Types, unique indexes, non-null fields and foreign keys all help.
The book also only works at the database level. I want to add examples of how to connect to the database.
Developer Rants 