Book review : ElasticSearch Server by Rafal Kuc, Marek Rogozinski

I'm not usually doing a lot of book reviews, mainly because i'm usually not finishing any book i begin... But i decided to finish this one, and i wanted to express my views on this book. If you look at the reviews of ElasticSearch Server on amazon.com you will get a first opinion that i can only agree with, this book is not for you, if you're looking for advanced tips and tweakings about ElasticSearch.

It's mainly for begginners and it will get you through your first fears facing this versatile piece of technology, but if i were you i'd only consider this book when learning how to use elasticsearch if you have no prior experience with Apache Solr or Lucene.

It does a good job introducing indexes and mappings and the fact that even if elasticsearch shields you from the old “Solr  - schema.xml” by defining a default mapping for all newly created indexes and types (belonging to an index), this does not prevent you from needing to re-index all data when you realize the mapping you're using is not exactly... adequate.

The main part of the book, at least the one i'd recommend, is not the part about Cluster Administration or the Getting started part, it's the Searching your data chapter of the book. To me, this chapter is a reference part for all the query types  supported by ElasticSearch and can be very useful when searching what kind of query you need.

All in all it's not a bad book and you can keep it on the long term as a reference for the query DSL used by ElasticSearch through the HTTP/JSon API, but if you need something to guide you safely into production, you're better off experimenting by yourself.

Don't hesitate to tell me what you think 😉

Vale