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There hasn't been any books about ElasticSearch (that I know of), and http://www.elasticsearch.org/guide/ seems to contain only references.

Any good beginner's guide or tutorials, perhaps by examples, to recommend, especially in terms of the different mapping and indexing strategies?

uzyn
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    For any future hunters, a book has now been published: http://www.amazon.com/ElasticSearch-Server-ebook/dp/B00BAOC2KQ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1361450832&sr=8-1&keywords=elasticsearch – ianmayo Feb 24 '13 at 12:08
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    You might want to checkout the free book I'm writing at http://exploringelasticsearch.com . The focus is on building a solid conceptual foundation anchored in real world examples. – Andrew Cholakian May 23 '13 at 17:12
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    I have found so many useful stuff here because of this question. How on earth it's not constructive! Thanks for asking and thanks anyone to keep updating their answers. – Maziyar Feb 03 '14 at 16:23
  • @AndrewCholakian Could you run the examples from the book with Elastic Hammer? To me trying to run the examples from Figure 2.4 returns conn errored, although my Elastic Search is running and I loaded the movie database. I wonder what I am doing wrong, did it work for you? – Crista23 Apr 01 '14 at 08:07
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    If a question has over a hundred upvotes, it certainly is constructive. Why is one dorkenstein permitted to block everyone else from contributing?! – btk Sep 09 '15 at 20:11
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    Always great too come to SO to find an incredibly useful question marked as otherwise – Conrad Nov 03 '15 at 03:04
  • And yet another book that's just been published by Manning: [Elasticsearch in Action](http://manning.com/hinman) – Val Dec 12 '15 at 06:26
  • Lots of these resources may be outdated as of 2021... So I've released my own handbook at https://elasticsearchbook.com! – Joe - GMapsBook.com Apr 01 '21 at 19:33

4 Answers4

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Edit (April 2015):

As many have noticed, my old blog is now defunct. Most of my articles were transferred over to the Elastic blog, and can be found by filtering on my name: https://www.elastic.co/blog/author/zachary-tong

To be perfectly honest, the best source of beginner knowledge is now Elasticsearch - The Definitive Guide written by myself and Clinton Gormley.

It assumes zero search engine knowledge and explains information retrieval first principals in context of Elasticsearch. While the reference docs are all about finding the precise parameter you need, the Guide is a narrative that discusses problems in search and how to solve them.

Best of all, the book is OSS and free (unless you want to buy a paper copy, in which case O'Reilly will happily sell you one :) )

Edit (August 2013):

Many of my articles have been migrated over to the official Elasticsearch blog, as well as new articles that have not been published on my personal site.

Original post:

I've also been frustrated with learning ElasticSearch, having no Lucene/Solr experience. I've been slowly documenting things I've learned at my blog, and have four tutorials written so far:

So I don't have to keep editing, all future tutorials on my blog can be found under this category link.

And these are some links that I have bookmarked, because they have been incredibly helpful in one way or another:

Zach
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    Thanks for writing and sharing about your blog with the tutorials. I've gone through some of them and I find them very well written. Some of these, esp the one on mapping, ought to be linked from the main ES site. Really appreciate your collection of links as well. – uzyn Aug 02 '12 at 16:35
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    This is also helpful for pure code samples: https://github.com/kimchy/talks/blob/master/2011/wsnparis/ By the way, the Poster addin for firefox is pretty helpful for playing around with and RestAPI such as ElasticSearch. – J.T. Jan 14 '13 at 16:08
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    I'm actually writing a book on elasticsearch which is available here: http://exploring-elasticsearch.com/ . It's still in draft form, but may be useful – Andrew Cholakian Apr 15 '13 at 15:27
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    looks like http://euphonious-intuition.com is down – alex Aug 13 '14 at 22:35
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    @alex it is, sorry...having some hosting troubles. I'll get it back online soon! – Zach Aug 20 '14 at 16:29
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    seems euphonious-intuition.com is still down :( – Prasad19sara Nov 18 '14 at 04:29
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    The links above are expired! – Solix Aug 19 '15 at 12:36
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    @Zach The links given are not available now .Its goddady default page – Sarath Sadasivan Pillai Sep 28 '15 at 06:30
  • For those still searching for a concise book: I've put together and released a collection of "Use Case vs. Approach" guides at https://elasticsearchbook.com! – Joe - GMapsBook.com Apr 01 '21 at 19:31
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You can Learn the overview using this link

http://spinscale.github.com/elasticsearch/2012-03-jugm.html#/1

George Viju
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I found Elastic Search one of the hardest things I've had to learn, I hadn't used Lucene before and I found the documentation to be quite hard to follow.

These are the things that I wish I'd known before I started learning it:

Configuration and setup

I configured ELS to run on 3 VM' using Centos, Mint and Ubuntu. Centos was by far the best choice of the three.

I followed this guide to help me set it up (it worked fine on all three distros)

Index and types

One Index can contain many types, it's by using types that you can achieve a good degree of separation of data that belongs within the same index.

PHP

I use PHP as a front end and used this wrapper to integrate my ELS installation into my scripts.

Other resources

The presentation in the other answer to your question is really good, go through it and learn the DSL Query syntax, once setup this is where the real power of ELS comes into its own.

David Barker
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  • Thank you very much for the very useful pointers. I've been looking for good pointers like these when I first asked the question due to the lacking of a proper tutorial-like guide for ES. – uzyn Jul 26 '12 at 09:43
  • While you suggested https://github.com/nervetattoo/elasticsearch, I have been following https://github.com/ruflin/Elastica for months and seen good followings and activities around Elastica. You have any comments on the 2 wrappers, if you have checked out both? – uzyn Jul 26 '12 at 09:44
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    Yeah actually, the Elastica wrapper is really good as well, it is far more powerful than the repo I've been using but with more power comes greater complexity that at the time I didnt want as Elastic Search itself was proving enough of a challenge :) – David Barker Jul 26 '12 at 10:13
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If you're new to elasticsearch and the “information retrieval” / “fulltext search” in general, my advice would be to check these resources first, before trying out tutorials on specific features:

karmi
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