This is the paper people usually use to explain some of the performance benefits you could reap, besides the talk about row vs column based performance:
Note that I wouldn't really recommend it unless you're really going to do low level programming for high performance. It's super long, explains all the details, if you've got a basic CS college education you should know most of it already anyway.
If you're just a web developer this won't actually help you as most of this improvements have already been done in the parts that matter (i.e. your database, your operating system, your interpreter and perhaps your application server).
Could you point to some sources?