Elasticsearch: The Definitive Guide (Draft)
From the Preface, who should read this book:
This book is for anybody who wants to put their data to work. It doesn’t matter whether you are starting a new project and have the flexibility to design the system from the ground up, or whether you need to give new life to a legacy system. Elasticsearch will help you to solve existing problems and open the way to new features that you haven’t yet considered.
This book is suitable for novices and experienced users alike. We expect you to have some programming background and, although not required, it would help to have used SQL and a relational database. We explain concepts from first principles, helping novices to gain a sure footing in the complex world of search.
The reader with a search background will also benefit from this book. Elasticsearch is a new technology which has some familiar concepts. The more experienced user will gain an understanding of how those concepts have been implemented and how they interact in the context of Elasticsearch. Even in the early chapters, there are nuggets of information that will be useful to the more advanced user.
Finally, maybe you are in DevOps. While the other departments are stuffing data into Elasticsearch as fast as they can, you’re the one charged with stopping their servers from bursting into flames. Elasticsearch scales effortlessly, as long as your users play within the rules. You need to know how to setup a stable cluster before going into production, then be able to recognise the warning signs at 3am in the morning in order to prevent catastrophe. The earlier chapters may be of less interest to you but the last part of the book is essential reading — all you need to know to avoid meltdown.
I fully understand the need, nay, compulsion for an author to say that everyone who is literate needs to read their book. And, if you are not literate, their book is a compelling reason to become literate! 😉
As the author of a book (two editions) and more than one standard, I can assure you an author’s need to reach everyone serves no one very well.
Potential readers ranges from novices, intermediate users and experts.
A book that targets all three will “waste” space on matter already know to experts but not to novices and/or intermediate users.
At the same time, space in a physical book being limited, some material relevant to the expert will be left out all together.
I had that experience quite recently when the details of LukeRequestHandler (Solr) were described as:
Reports meta-information about a Solr index, including information about the number of terms, which fields are used, top terms in the index, and distributions of terms across the index. You may also request information on a per-document basis.
That’s it. Out of more than 600+ pages of text, that is all the information you will find on LukeRequestHandler.
Fortunately I did find: https://wiki.apache.org/solr/LukeRequestHandler.
I don’t fault the author because several entire books could be written with the material they left out.
That is the hardest part of authoring, knowing what to leave out.
PS: Having said all that, I am looking forward to reading Elasticsearch: The Definitive Guide as it develops.