ElasticSearch Cookbook

I needed to ramp up on elastisearch quickly. Having never used it or anything like it, It was the perfect pace. The only reason I would not go 5 is because it does not cover aggregations, which going forward should act as an active replacement for facets. It's a great place to start, but in practice you'll find yourself consulting alongside the book the elasticsearch documentation, which is good in its own right. That said, I'm happy that I purchased the book.

In contrast to the books "ElasticSearch Server" and "Mastering ElasticSearch"the "ElasticSearch Cookbook" is definitely a hands-on, how-to-do book.The most important topics covered :- Explanation of the concept (it is simply different from the traditional RDBMS)- Installation- Indexing, Mapping, Query, Filtering of documents- Spatial Queries (can be a bit more detailed, but ok so far)- Optimizing of the Index (ES can "eat" TBs of unstructured data, here some ideas how the index can be structured)- Scripting- Infrastructural/Scalability aspects (ES scales pretty good - out of the box)- Monitoring, controlling (What/how to do when you want to put ES to production)So in general a useful book for those who want to know how to do a concrete task - for developers as wellfor sysops.Regards,Jiri Jetmar

It's not a must read but a nice addition to the two others books from the series, who owns them, will not need the chapters with explanation of the basic terms, and the installation guide either.This book contains some useful information about writing custom plugins, scripting, monitoring, some code integration is also covered, examples are for Java and Python.Sadly, aggregations are not mentioned (facets are), but still the book is worth a read.

The official ElasticSearch documentation is sometimes to sporadic. Don't take me wrong, I like developer manual that go to the point and this is not an extensive cookbook full of example. You get all the API documented with every time one request and response example and some hint to avoid common pitfall, that's it. Chapter are short and cross referenced avoiding reading two time the same explanation. I'm using the PDF version of this book has my main reference now.... thanks!

DISCLAIMER: I was given a free copy of this book and asked to review it.This book does a good job of getting to the point and leading you on the path of understanding. This author has obviously spent time with ElasticSearch and knows what he is talking about. Then once you've started the cookbook format makes the book a handy reference for you to look up any specific task you need. I was especially grateful because I had not yet seen an example of native plugins. I tried many of the code samples and they all worked as expected. I've tried to follow the docs online and while they are good quality they are lacking.The downsides are first and foremost - the editing. There are plenty of typos (not in the code) and it reads like broken English. Second, and this is minor, I found two concepts - boosting and arbiter - that bear pointing out. Boosting wasn't covered for more than a sentence. It's not difficult, but if you haven't worked much with any Lucene projects before make sure you look it up so you understand it. Arbiter is a term I hadn't heard used before. It's helpful in the way it conveys the concept, but I couldn't find it mentioned elsewhere. Again, it's not a bad thing, but if you need more help understanding it online you won't find it.My final point is no fault of the author or publisher. ElasticSearch is releasing features at break-neck speed. Keeping up would likely mean never publishing. However, it is unfortunate that this book is based on v0.9x since v1 is already at RC1 at the time this book was published and there now entire chapters on features that will be deprecated in the v1.0 release (Facets, Rivers, Monitoring) because ES has either declared they will be replaced (facets) or removed (rivers) entirely or they have provided new tools that it would be foolish to ignore (Marvel).Pros: - Author is obviously knowledgeable and has a solid understanding of ElasticSearch. - A quick read that will get you started in no time. - This is the most up-to-date book released at the moment. - Code samples I tested worked as expectedCons: - Poor editing - abundant typos and phrases that read like "broken english". Frankly it's distracting. - At least one concept glossed over (boosting) and another concept added that can't be found anywhere in ElasticSearch docs or forums (arbiter). - The book is based on v0.9x and v1.0 replaces some important features

While cookbooks are not a suitable format for every technology out there, it certainly works for ElasticSearch, as it has so many features to write about.The book covers everything from setting up and configuring a single server or a cluster, working with the REST API (along with good recommendations on plugins to make your life more comfortable) as well as short examples in Python and Java to get you comfortable transforming your knowledge in REST interface to programming languages.Recipes represent common tasks you will encounter while working with ES, thus it serves as a good reference book after you've finished reading it.This book covers ES v.0.90.x, but the changes and improvements in 1.x.x versions are subtle and easily adaptable once you master the basics.I highly recommend this book to anyone who needs to quickly master ElasticSearch and is having problems in finding his way through the official documentation.