Customer Reviews

CouchDB: The Definitive Guide: Time to Relax (Animal Guide)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

It's difficult to be too critical of a book freely available online but as others have said it's a frustrating read. Some of the disussion of features like MVCC and map reduce is amazingly bad, and the book really doesn't feel like it's been edited. The end result is a lot of time wasted trying to piece together what the authors are trying to say.

It's also annoying that a "definitive" book is now being followed by little oreilly books on mapreduce in couchdb and scaling couchdb.

For a free book fine, but definitely not worth paying for.

This book covers most of the important topics but is not very well structured. It feels like an unfinished wiki.

And one thing is totally missing: A walk through an real example - from the beginning to the end...

This book is very weak and almost reads like a marketing brochure than a definitive guide. I would stay away from it, even the free version cost quite a bit in wasted time. This is the worst technical guide I've read from O'Reilly.

I've been a programmer for about 15 years, so I got a lot of the book, but it's far from the best techie book I've ever read.

The book would be better if it were written in a linear fashion walking the reader through a basic overview of CounchDB and then run the reader through building an application that gets more complicated as the reader progresses through the book and CouchDB features.

The example application is a full-blown, albeit light-weight, blogging application. It's way to complicated though to help the reader understand CouchDB.

And rather than building code with the book, you end up just looking at the CMS code and trying to relate that to the book. That's frustrating because the Sofa code has changed radically than what's in the book, so most of the stuff in the book makes no sense.

There is a lot of good information in the book, but it's not presented in a useful way, particularly for people who might not understand programming at a deep level.

But CouchDB rocks and it's a pretty new technology, so it's evolving much more quickly than a book can keep up with.

I have been reading about couch for a little ove a year now, but never took the plunge to use it until recently and couldn't be happier. However, there were some stumbling blocks that I need to work through and this book has been BY FAR the best general reference for all things CouchDB.

I too, was met with the fragmented & semi-annoyed feeling from the book at first. In my case, it was because everything in it was pretty much completely new to me, which makes me suspicious that my initial reaction was influenced by a sort of ego defense mechanism or something. Fortunately for me, I was convinced by a very enthusiastic and forward thinking colleague that we need to build our next system on top of CouchDB, because it's going to fundamentally change the way we are going compute, deliver, and interact with extremely complex and highly heterogeneous biotech data. I'll be honest ... The learning curve given zero background in the material is a little steep, but there are plenty of blogs and tweets that complement the text quite nicely. In my experience, the more I've put into understanding all that Couch has to offer, the more I feel my creativity and obsession for computing seems to be reaching unprecedented levels. This book is pretty much always an arm's length away.

I was originally drawn to CouchDB to use as just a database management system behind ColdFusion. However, I was really taken away by the ability to create full web-applications in CouchDB (entirely in Javascript, nonetheless). This book explores that ability in sufficient detail, covering all aspects of the development. A few of the concepts were new to me but this book made them easy to grasp. Sections that covered old knowledge were still worth reading.

The formatting was a drawback in some cases. The code-blocks and explanations were not presented the same in every chapter. Sometimes code was explained, then shown; sometimes the code was shown first then broken down. This lack of consistency had me flipping back and forth. This was [obviously] not a deterrent though. Otherwise, the book was the same high quality I've come to expect from this publisher.

In short, this book got me really excited about CouchDB and writing Javascript web-applications again. This is a great book to delve into a branch of technology that is increasingly widespread and relevant: schema-less databases.