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22 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good overview, but feels fragmented, February 7, 2010
This review is from: CouchDB: The Definitive Guide: Time to Relax (Animal Guide) (Paperback)
The book does a good job covering the features that make CouchDB such an exciting technology - schema-free document-based storage, REST API, MapReduce, powerful replication, embedded applications, etc. I'd recommend it for developers with a good background in web programming that are looking for a new way of building and scaling applications. Database administrators will also benefit from its coverage of replication and sharding.
The organization and editing are, unfortunately, not so good. Topics seem strangely ordered, cross references are awkward, and chapters alternate between repeating material unnecessarily and assuming knowledge of material that has not yet been covered. I'd guess this comes from merging the work of three authors, but O'Reilly usually does a better job cleaning up the inevitable collisions.
That aside, this is still a good introduction to the subject, and will give you enough background to start exploring CouchDB without getting (too) lost. Well worth a place on your NoSQL bookshelf.
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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
An amateur mess, February 3, 2011
This review is from: CouchDB: The Definitive Guide: Time to Relax (Animal Guide) (Paperback)
This book contains most of the information you need about CouchDB, or at least as much as can be included about software that hasn't reached 1.0 yet. The authors admit this problem and do their best to prep you for it. Unfortunately, it is hair-pulling-outly poorly written and an organizational nightmare. It can be likened to Wikipedia: the information is there, but it is written by people who have no business as editors. The writing feels very crowd-sourced and jumps randomly between topics, so reading this book linearly (you know, like a book) will leave your head spinning. Also, many of the sentences are "here's a complicated and extremely important idea, but don't worry about it until later." It has a big problem with progressive disclosure; it throws random terms at you and then explains nothing about them, assuming you'll remember how it fits into the bigger picture 70 pages later.
The book also does a poor job of explaining certain things in any depth. For example, after detailing what you think is a complete overview of CouchDB, the book introduces Couch's "design document" concept without any previous reference. No information is given on how design documents relate to your database(s) or how you're supposed to set them up vs your data structure. It is like describing what a hammer looks like without explaining that you actually need to hit nails with it.
There is no followable coherency as the book struggles to explain how maps, reduces, views and designs are used. It almost feels as if the authors were just writing things as they came to their minds, and didn't spend any time creating a layout for the book and topic introduction. May god help you as you struggle to follow the maze of thought this book presents.
I absolutely recommend against buying this book until the complete rewrite second edition comes out. There is absolutely no justification of the current $34 asking price. It is also (legally) available for free online. If you want an actual book, wait it out if you can, because this edition is an amateur mess.
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Good overview, needs more depth., March 8, 2010
This review is from: CouchDB: The Definitive Guide: Time to Relax (Animal Guide) (Paperback)
I am new the CouchDB and NoSQL and I found this book to be good introduction to the subject. The book does a good job of explaining why one would use CouchDB and its benefits over traditional relational databases. Like other reviewers I felt that book was poorly organized and edited. Many chapters jumped from one subject to the next without much warning.
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