MongoDB: The Definitive Guide [Paperback]

Kristina Chodorow (Author), Michael Dirolf (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 24, 2010 | ISBN-10: 1449381561 | ISBN-13: 978-1449381561 | Edition: 1

How does MongoDB help you manage a huMONGOus amount of data collected through your web application? With this authoritative introduction, you'll learn the many advantages of using document-oriented databases, and discover why MongoDB is a reliable, high-performance system that allows for almost infinite horizontal scalability.

Written by engineers from 10gen, the company that develops and supports this open source database, MongoDB: The Definitive Guide provides guidance for database developers, advanced configuration for system administrators, and an overview of the concepts and use cases for other people on your project. Learn how easy it is to handle data as self-contained JSON-style documents, rather than as records in a relational database.

• Explore ways that document-oriented storage will work for your project
• Learn how MongoDB’s schema-free data model handles documents, collections, and multiple databases
• Execute basic write operations, and create complex queries to find data with any criteria
• Use indexes, aggregation tools, and other advanced query techniques
• Learn about monitoring, security and authentication, backup and repair, and more
• Set up master-slave and automatic failover replication in MongoDB
• Use sharding to scale MongoDB horizontally, and learn how it impacts applications
• Get example applications written in Java, PHP, Python, and Ruby

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Kristina Chodorow, a software engineer at 10gen, is a core contributor to the MongoDB project and has worked on the database server, PHP driver, Perl driver, and many other areas. She’s given talks at conferences around the world, including OSCON, LinuxCon, FOSDEM, and Latinoware.

Mike Dirolf, also a software engineer at 10gen, is the lead maintainer for PyMongo (the MongoDB Python driver), and the former maintainer for the MongoDB Ruby driver. He’s given talks about MongoDB at major conferences around the world.

Product Details

• Paperback: 216 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 1 edition (September 24, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1449381561
• ISBN-13: 978-1449381561
• Product Dimensions: 7 x 0.4 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #435,571 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

67 of 73 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Not Good Enough September 24, 2011

By Nick de Plume

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

For each product out there, there is a must-have book associated with it. This is not the one for MongoDB.

First let's talk about coverage: The author has written a total of 3 books under the MonogDB label, all under O'Reilly:, this one with 200 pages, the "tips" one with 66 pages(!) and the "scaling" one which is even slimmer at 60 pages!!), and each single one with a price tag of ~US$30. The total page count doesn't make this division necessary. Why not aggregate all this writing into a single volume?

I don't believe this book is very useful if you are a developer and you are looking to adopt a NoSQL DB. This book lacks in all the places a definitive guide should deliver. After quickly reading it in one session (it's very slim), I still felt "hungry" to learn more about the product. There isn't much more covered in those pages than what's available online for free. The example material in various programming languages, occupying a third of the book, shouldn't even be printed. That's what a link to a website, accessible to readers who invested in a hard or digital copy, is for. The rest of the contents goes about NoSQL as much as you can read from the MongoDB org or what a good ol' Google search will return by querying these keywords.

My closing note to the publisher: pack the content of those 3 books you've got from the same author inside one single book and call it "A introduction guide to MongoDB". Continue to sell it for the same price tag as of a single volume. I'll rate this one higher.

My closing note to the author: I believe there is still a need to write a real definitive guide for this technology. It should contain much more details than what you've written up so far. A brief search on forums suffices to show you what areas need to be expanded.... MongoDB is new and a definitive guide is what it needs for becoming more adopted. Read more ›

31 of 34 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A good intro and reference September 27, 2010

By MattK

Format:Paperback

As an RDBMS practitioner (MSSQL, PostgreSQL), I was interested in coming up to speed with some of these new alternative data stores. I chose MongoDB initially due the "look and feel" of it's site, documentation, and community. After watching an O'Reilly webcast, I was interested enough to purchase the book.

At around 200 pages, it is concise enough to read cover to cover - something I rarely do with tech books, often preferring to use the longer ones as a reference. The introduction does an excellent job of introducing the concepts behind MongoDB, bridging them to the relational database concepts I already know. It goes into explaining the pros and cons of "No(tOnly)SQL" engines, and mentions some of the datatype "gotchas" one needs to be aware of in using the JavaScript shell, which would not be obvious to one used to using SQL to directly query an engine instead of the JavaScript interface in the Mongo shell.

In subsequent chapters, implementation, administration, and development concepts are covered. There is also a brief internals section that may help the traditional database user understand the inner workings of the MongoDB engine.

It is an enjoyable read, and I expect that this book will continue to be a useful reference after the initial read through, as my experimentation with MongoDB continues.

21 of 25 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Not definitive, not much for developers, and THIN! January 26, 2011

By JOHN D RILEY

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

This certainly isn't a definitive guide for MongoDB. It's a high-level intro.
It hits most of the important points to understanding Mongo capabilities and design. And it's organized in a more intelligent manner than the online Mongo DOCS. OK so far. But this book is still very reliant on on the mongo command line tool for examples. For most useful purposes, the command line is just a quick teaching tool -- aside from admin tasks, you're not really using Mongo as a database until you're writing client applications with the drivers.
Other thoughts:
* I knew this book was lacking when I looked for "write_concern", "slaveOK", and "thread"/"thread safe" in the index and found nothing
* The discussion of getLastError, and error-handling in general is weak...this is an important topic for deciding on the performance/reliability/function of a real MongoDB client application and coding it accordingly
* As much as I want to better understand the various Mongo drivers described online at api<dot>mongodb<dot>org, there's not much complementary info in this book
I know, I know, Mongo is new. I just wish there were something better for quenching the thirst for power that developers have. And I know there are 10+ languages for the drivers, but in the interest of seeing deeper instruction, I'd rather see a focus on ONE language (Java might be best for most, even if a developer is working with something else...they will know Java).
Still, I believe MongoDB will be the noSQL database standard. Maybe I'll try another book.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Great intro to MongoDB and NoSQL October 26, 2010

By Matt Lord

Format:Paperback

Summary:
If you're coming from a relational database background and wish to learn more about MongoDB or are interested
in it as an example of a NoSQL implementation, this is a great book. I enjoyed reading it and learned quite a bit
in the process. Read below for the full review.

I'm coming from a traditional relational database background, specializing in MySQL over the last 7 years. I was hoping
that this book would be a good introduction to NoSQL in general as well as how to use MongoDB specifically.

It turned out to be all that I was hoping for and more. It's very easy to read and the material is very easy to
grasp. If you're coming from MySQL, things will feel familiar from the get go. For example, I installed mongodb
on Ubuntu 10.10 using apt (version 1.4.4 of mongod) and the default config file was /etc/mongodb.conf and the
default data directory was /var/lib/mongodb. If you're familiar with JavaScript you'll also have a leg up as the
mongo client is a full JavaScript interpreter.

So, all I needed to do was apt-get install mongodb and I had mongodb installed, up and running. I used this quick
install to play with as I read through the book. The book was full of clear and concise examples that I could use
to easily play around with MongoDB and get a feel for using it.

The layout of the book was very good in that the chapters cover the basics while the book still contains the more
detailed information in the Appendixes. I liked this separation of material, a separation of the "book" and the
"reference material" if you will.

In the end, I'm not sure how big a fan I am of MongoDB itself, but I'm a big fan of this book.... I had an installation
of MongoDB up and running that I could configure, administer and query. All of this and nothing seemed
difficult or confusing. It was exactly what I was hoping for. Read more ›