Elasticsearch The Definitive Guide
Introduction
Searching big data in real-time is no longer impossible. In fact it is rather becoming the standard and Apache Lucene seems to be the technology of choice for most users. However many users will not use Lucene directly similar to the fact that the assembly programming language not is the first choice for software developers. Elasticsearch can be thought of as an easy to use front-end for Lucene. The on-line documentation for Elasticsearch will tell you how to use the different features of Elasticsearch but it will not tell you the why and when to use these features. The book Elasticsearch The Definitive Guide aims at explaining why and when and not just how.
Searching
Searching is complex and distributed search is complicated. Elasticsearch will however make it quite easy by providing a consistent RESTful API over JSON and HTTP which should be familiar to many software developers. Basic seach is very similar to querying MongoDB from the commandline so knowledge of MongoDB will give you a head start and if not the syntax is simple and easy to learn given lots of examples from the book. I really like the chapters about full text and proximity search. Before diving into such more advanced topics the authors will explain the background for such topics and why it is relevant. Afterwards the features are covered in relevant Elasticsearch terms. Natural language searching is also covered. Elasticsearch comes will build in support for a large number of languages and the books goes thought the various configuration options as well as how to deal with mixing of several languages.
Conclusion
The book will get you up and running quickly but it will also answer your more trickier questions once you start using the more advanced features. There is something for everyone in this book whether you are user, developer, or devops engineer. This is both a strength and weakness of the book. For a newcomer to Elasticsearch it might be easier to read a book specifically targeted at your needs. But once you start learning more about Elasticsearch you might get interested in other areas and in that case you will find that they are already covered by this book. The number of books about Elasticsearch is limited and The Definitive Guide is definitely a recommendable resource for creating real time search solutions.
Disclosure
I review for the O`Reilly Reader Review Program and I want to be transparent about my reviews so you should know that I received a free copy of this ebook in exchange of my review.
Please note that this review is based on an early release of the book.
Book details
Title: Elasticsearch: The Definitive Guide. A distributed real-time search and analytics engine
Authors: Clinton Gormley, Zachary Tong
Publisher: O’Reilly Media
ISBN-10: 1449358543
Release Date: January 2015
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