Packt recently asked me to review their new publication Mastering ElasticSearch by Rafał Kuć and Marek Rogoziński. Since most of my experience with elasticsearch has been from a systems points of view — index management, cluster maintenance, indexing performance — I paid most attention to the chapters about those parts of elasticsearch.

I found the book to quite informative, and technically accurate. The chapter titled Fighting with Fire was an intriguing addition, acknowledging that in the real-world, dealing with system problems (and sometimes failures!) is a very important part of running large distributed systems. This chapter only scratched the surface — but the topics it did cover are valid, and I’ve dealt with them myself, many times.

In general the book is a good balance of information about indexing and searching, as well as running an elasticsearch cluster. There are a few minor typographical errors in the book, and one place the text refers to a “master” shard, when it should read “primary” shard, but it’s clear from the context what the text means. All-in-all, these errors are few.

While most of the information presented in the book is available in the elasticsearch docs, or online in other forms, this book brings it together in a highly coherent manner, approachable style, and is worthwhile reading for those with some initial experience with elasticsearch.

In the interests of full disclosure: Packt provided me with a free e-copy of the book for the purposes of the review.