Mastering Elasticsearch

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.

First off, a disclaimer for newbies: This book is meant for intermediate users of the Elasticsearch Server. Still, the book begins with a short but comprehensive introduction to the basic concepts used in document indexing, the various node types in Elasticsearch and the Apache Lucene library that powers Elasticsearch under the hood. The examples in the book are based on the premise that the user is running an online bookstore which is a powerful way to explore the possibilities offered by Elasticsearch. The examples are in JSON document format which should be familiar to any serious developer. The score of a query determines how well the document matches the input query. The scoring formula is explained using asimple example to demonstrate how it works in practice. Query rewrite methods, filters and types of queries are explained in detail with a special focus on their performance impact. Simple use cases let the readers know when to use which query group. A new sandboxed scripting language called Groovy is introduced that enables on-the-fly calculation of document scores without compromising the security of the search server. Lucene expressions are also given a brief touch. Readers will enjoy the chapter on improving search suggestions which can make a real difference in the search experience of users. Plenty of examples in this chapter help to take the guesswork out of improving query relevance. Filtering garbage results and using term faceting to narrow down search results are discussed to give readers the power to tailor their websites according to their needs for maximum user satisfaction. Scaling to accommodate increasing demands requires the right amount of shards and replicas. Deciding this amount is explored with a practical routing example. The final few chapters deal with low level index control, Elasticsearch administration, performance improving techniques and developing Elasticsearch plugins. whether you have a single node or an entire cluster of nodes in the cloud, the sheer amount of information contained in over 400 pages of this book ensures that readers will find this book a worthy companion in their quest to tame and tune Elasticsearch server for blazing fast query speed and highly relevant search results.

This book provide a quick start into elasticsearch, focusing on a intermediate-to-expert audience. Readers that have zero knowledge on the subject might find themselves a bit lost(the topic is far from simple after all) but doing some exercises using other sources can provide you a decent starting point to understand the book topics(the books requires a working farm to run the samples, making it happen is up to you). The book writing is simple but the topic is not going to help so don't worry if you feel a bit lost at times. If you need to set up a decent search engine for metadata analysis on a shoestring budget this book will give you extra insight on how to create and manage complex queries.

I've been using ElasticSearch professionally for over 6 months - our first version product using ElasticSearch has shipped this week!Whilst it is fairly easy to get started with ElasticSearch, there are a lot of fundamental aspects to it (and its underpinnings) which can have a dramatic affect on using it. And, whilst there are some good examples, they tend to be fairly simplistic.Up until I got this book I'd been (extensively!!) relying on Google. And whilst I've eventually managed to work out the answers, it took a lot of searching and therefore a lot longer than I'd have ideally liked. In addition, finding individual snippets on the web doesn't help with some of the broad knowledge.I found this book to be an excellent guide to help me understand the underpinnings of ElasticSearch, and also helped me to make many improvements in my Google-aquired knowledge. I would recommend it to anyone how is spending any amount of time with ElasticSearch.