MongoDB: The Definitive Guide
“MongoDB: The Definitive Guide” (by Kristina Chodorow and Michael Dirolf) is a concise and practical guide to develop & manage a MongoDB backed application. I appreciate the fact that the book covers both the developer side and the administration part of working with Mongo.
As a developer I read & worked it out in the following way :
1. Installing the server and testing the Mongo basics – Ch. 1,2,3,4 – (it’s good practice to write small pieces of code to check how the things you read work out)
- installed MongoDB with my Linux package manager (I have Ubuntu, but the MongoDB server is available in most major Linux distributions as a package) – check Appendix A for a detailed way to install Mongo and Ch. 8 – part 1 for starting/stopping it
- read chapters 1-4 (Introduction, Getting started, CRUD, Querying)
In the first 4 chapters the book focuses both on practical things like CRUD & querying (with sample code in the console) & on the data design part. I found that the data design part to be of considerable importance for the developer that works with a “document based” database for the first time in his life. As you will see (if you give Mongo a try), MongoDB pushes the the “document based” model to the limits, allowing the developer to use a powerfull and sometimes SQL-like query language. In terms of time I believe that understanding the first four chapters (and their examples) should not take more than 12 hours. After you finish this you should be able to build a small blog-like app on your own.
2. Getting into aggregation & indexing – Ch. 5,6 : gives a good insight in how to optimize your Mongo for speed (with the right indexing) and some more information on ways to use aggregated/summarizing queries. This is also a good read but make sure you have some data in your test database so you can test counting, summing & the rest. If you have some experience with SQL indexing and aggregation you can skip most parts of those two chapters and just focus on the syntax.
3. The advanced topics : This is covered in Ch. 7 and shows off some “cool” and rather unique capabilities of Mongo : capped collections (great for logging), distributed filesystem, server-side scripting (in Javascript!). This is also worth your reading so that maybe you can implement the features you need with them, instead building something from scratch.
In total, it would take you around 20 hours to read the first 7 chapters.
As a server administrator (some developers for large scale system will also need to wear this hat from time to time) The last 3 chapters deal with administration (clustering, replication, backup, monitoring, etc.). Read it just to get some insight. But it’s just an intro. If you want to use Mongo in a production environment, go search more on the net on this one.
As a whole the book is a very good introduction and I would strongly recommend it to anyone who wants to seriously start doing something with Mongo.
A Practical Guide to Content Delivery Networks
“A Practical Guide to Content Delivery Networks” (by Gilbert Held) is an introduction to CDN’s, covering just the basics. If you have some decent knowledge of networking (ie. TCP/IP fundamentals) you can skip the first three chapters and go right to the two CDN technical chapters : Ch4. : “The CDN Model” & Ch5. “Caching and load balancing”. Both those chapters are worth you time :
- Ch4. “The CDN Model” : an accessible presentation of the architecture and role of a CDN and why you can’t beat the CDN model with your local server rack
- Ch5. “Caching and load balancing” : the most valuable thing here is the detailed presentation of the META tags used in requests & responses so that you can control how caching is done both upstream/request and downstream/response
The last 2 chapters are a little bit less technical and cover stuff that’s more related to the business model and gathering statistics from your CDN usage (ie. logs & monitoring). So I would recommend that you focus on Ch4. & Ch5. and if you got some slack, give Ch6. and Ch7. a try.
reading Terry Pratchett
Today I stumbled uppon a Terry Pratchett’s novel (Wings). I think it’s really wonderfully written. It helps you get a fresh perspective upon the daily things.
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