Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/Compudicted/archive/2015/05/10/mastering-elasticsearch---second-edition-by-rafa%c5%82-ku%c4%87-and-marek.aspx
It is hard to underestimate the importance of the search nowadays. It probably even occurs without being noticed, but try to count how many times a day you tried to search for a product online, search through an online catalogue, an abbreviation or simply a weather forecast? Even a simple one page document or a webpage offers search capabilities (Ctrl-F). But have you ever wondered about how fast the search through Wiki is or how exact it is, even correcting your misspellings?
These and more elaborate searches are a product of very powerful software. Typically thanks the Lucene index, it is like standing on the shoulders of a giant, Solr and Elasticsearch are capable of scouting through a sea of documents and terms in milliseconds, boosting the most relevant results to the top helping human or robot deliver business insight, guide through darkness of overwhelming amounts of information to the decision or helping buy the correct product.
It becomes very obvious that these products encapsulate tons of advanced features and boast an array of capabilities, but sifting through the myriad of the features may at times become exhausting, and sure time consuming.
This is where the excellent technical literature as Mastering Elasticsearch 2nd Edition makes a lot of sense. Please note, this is the 2nd edition in a very short period of time (less than two years). What it means, there are two things. First, the book is very popular so the authors get a lot of support and demand for a sequel, second, the technology is evolving fast (~ 100 pages added). All these are good news and a confirmation that Elasticsearch is a mature yet promising technology that is here to stay. It will not be needless to state that this book is seen by the authors as a companion book to the Elasticsearch Server 2nd Edition that I did not read, but the authors stress out that it is a good idea to start from one.
The Mastering Elasticsearch book does feel like aiming at the search engineers, or those who already is involved in conceiving or using a product that will utilize the search capabilities of Elasticsearch. It is full of practical advice, insight and examples that are ranging from fine-tuning the searches to setting and properly configuring the cluster up. There is a chapter toward the end about how to crate plugins to any software project.
I liked the following parts in the book: boosting search scores, using Groovy as a scripting language, troubleshooting and speeding up performance.
Some knowledge of Java is assumed, but no special tooling or software is necessary to go through the book. But please be aware that you will type a lot of text, JSON specifically, so you may want an editor that has good support for JSON especially color highlighting e.g. the Eclipse JSON plugin. Groovy was used very lightly and all the examples were very eloquent.
On the missing thing part, I did not see any examples on how to execute geospatial searched event though it was mentioned that these are possible, and I was highly interested in it.
It does not reduce my score even a bit though, this is an example of a very hard work on the part of the authors and publisher, five our of five.
