pgWest 2010 conference topics for beginners

I'm new to Postgres by way of programming in REAL Studio and its bundled database driver. Postgres keeps looking better and better. So my interest was piqued when I heard about the annual conferences where both the creators and users of Postgres congregate, alternating east and west coasts of the US.

Nov 2-4, 2010 is the west coast conference, called ‘pgWest’. This time around it’s located in downtown San Francisco. Even as a newbie, I found a useful topic in all the time slots. Here's a list of my picks among the busy agenda:

• GUCs: a Three-Hour Tour - Josh Berkus
• Securing your web application - Dave Page
• Survey of PostgreSQL Monitoring Tools - Gabrielle Roth
  or
  PostgreSQL Reporting with BIRT - MBennett
• PostgreSQL Backup and Recovery Methods - Kevin Kempter
• The PostgreSQL Community: an introductory tour - Josh Berkus
• Achieve PCI Compliance with PostgreSQL - Denish Patel
• MVCC Unmasked - Bruce Momjian
• Scaling PostgreSQL with Hot Standby - Greg Smith
• Rapid Upgrades With Pg_Upgrade - Bruce Momjian
• Postgres 9, the other stuff - Robert Treat
• Building and Distributing PostgreSQL Extensions Without Learning C- David Wheeler

There is also a mention but no information about a full day training session on Nov 5 by Bruce Momjian.