Elasticsearch - The Definitive Guide

For a long time, new users have struggled to get started with our reference docs, and for a long time we have been promising “something better”. Today, we are proud to announce the early release edition of “Elasticsearch - The Definitive Guide”, which will be published by O’Reilly Media.

It can be read online at elasticsearch.org/guide and it will be available to purchase in printed form or as an eBook from O’Reilly at http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/0636920028505.

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 have some database experience. 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.

It was very important to us to ensure that this book would be freely available to anybody who needs it. A lot of time and effort was invested in ensuring that it could be freely read online, while still making it available in eBook and printed format. We would like to thank O’Reilly for their support, cooperation and flexibility. They are one of the few publishers who really understand open source and have already made a number of their works available online for free. It is an honour to join their stable of authors.

The book is a long way from being finished — there is a lot to write about! However, we felt that there was enough content to be useful to many users already. Release soon release often! We will be uploading new chapters as they are finished. If you spot any errors in the book, or have suggestions for improving a section, we would love to hear from you. Please open an issue or a pull request on the GitHub repo: github.com/elasticsearch/elasticsearch-definitive-guide. We will need you to sign our standard Contributor agreement to ensure that your changes can be incorporated in the printed version of the book.

Happy reading!