This book is for anybody who wants to put their data to work. It doesn’t matter whether you are starting a new project and have the flexibility to design the system from the ground up, or whether you need to give new life to a legacy system. Elasticsearch will help you to solve existing problems and open the way to new features that you haven’t yet considered.

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 a relational database and SQL. 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. The more experienced user will gain an understanding of how familiar search concepts have been implemented and how they interact in the context of Elasticsearch. Even the early chapters contain nuggets of information that will be useful to the more advanced user.

Finally, maybe you are in DevOps. While the other departments are stuffing data into Elasticsearch as fast as they can, you’re the one charged with stopping their servers from bursting into flames. Elasticsearch scales effortlessly, as long as your users play within the rules. You need to know how to set up a stable cluster before going into production, and then be able to recognize the warning signs at three in the morning in order to prevent catastrophe. The earlier chapters may be of less interest to you, but the last part of the book is essential reading—​all you need to know to avoid meltdown.