Glad to see this. The reference documentation is pretty opaque.

So far, the best resource I've found is "Exploring Elasticsearch". http://exploringelasticsearch.com/

I'm looking at the guide and I see a lot of explanation but little to nothing in the way of clear, simple instructions that will cover the most typical basic use cases.

Of course Elasticsearch has many features and many different types of interfaces, but most people don't need to use most of those features, and having some example code available for a few common languages/platforms would be very useful.

Elasticsearch has done a great job of streamlining the use of Lucene and of course generally making many improvements, but based on the documentation I have seen including this new book, Elasticsearch must derive most of its income through consulting or support, and providing simple instructions obviously is a direct conflict of interest.

I believe that the average user is like me: they want to index some documents and then search the full text. They want a straightforward way to connect one or two search boxes on their web application to Elasticsearch and then retrieve some useful results. They do not want to learn the nuances of different engines or search interfaces. They do not want to read a book.

What i'd really love to see is an administrating Elasticsearch guide and a common recipes guide, both would be super helpful for getting started and more advanced tasks. Having run into issues with Elasticsearch data scaling, trying to pull answers out of the current guides or the IRC channel is like pulling teeth... from an alligator... with a laser attached to its head.

Easiest way for me to learn Elasticsearch was through queries generated by Kibana [1] and playing with them inside Sense [2]. Kibana relies on Facets, version elasticsearch 1.0 introduces Aggregations, I would suggest using aggregations for your projects.

[1] https://github.com/elasticsearch/kibana

[2] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sense/doinijnbnggo...

I recently started with elasticsearch for a hobby project, and my biggest issue with it is really finding things in the documentation.

For example, the documentation brings up relationships, like parent/child, but it isn't clear how to do the simplest case : return a parent's child documents.

Or the fact that the all the parameters to a request isn't listed in one clear place. Its all hidden by a dozen separate examples, but if I want to know options I can set for a _mapping, I can't find it.

If you want to set up Elasticsearch and have a quick play around with some queries I have written a beginner friendly intro which you may find useful:

http://red-badger.com/blog/2013/11/08/getting-started-with-e...

Looking forward to reading this book! Elasticsearch has been a great tool for us.

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There is also a free ebook exploring elastic search

http://exploringelasticsearch.com/

So excited to finally start seeing more books about Elasticsearch!

"Elasticsearch Server" is another really good book for anyone who's interested. http://www.packtpub.com/elasticsearch-server-for-fast-scalab...

Solr Cloud is more mature and more customizable. ES is perhaps easier to start with, but you could get a lot more customization and power with Solr Cloud. The Apache community will ensure Solr always remains at a bleeding edge and stable for large scale deployments.

Is it odd that there is no search on the elasticsearch site / docs / guide?

ElasticSearch >> Solr

They could not have chosen a more terrifying creature to put on the cover.

Congrats @clintongormley!

great job guys, looking forward for it!

I hear a lot about this but never really had a chance to incorporate it in my projects because I didn't understand what it as for and why

What snake is on the cover? I thought it was a tapeworm at first - a rather odd choice for a marketing animal :)

Awesome, just awesome. Finally. Yay.

Thanks dudes and dudettes.