Happy New Year everyone! I’ve been a bit quiet lately, owing to the holidays and work obligations, but I’m going to make a concerted effort this year to be a bit more active on my blog. I don’t, however, count writing skills amongst my talents – I can do tutorials, and how-to’s, but I don’t think I’ll ever be able to write informative, expository articles like some members of the JavaScript community do. I’d rather get my own hands dirty in the code than write about it!
So, in lieu of anything particularly insightful or original, I’ve decided to write some book reviews. I spend a fortune on books, half of which I never get around to reading. I’m hoping that creating a self imposed obligation to write book reviews will help me clear the backlog, and that the reviews might be useful to anyone thinking about making a purchase. And if they’re not, well, at least my blog gets some SEO fodder.
Enjoy 😉
Book Review: MongoDB in Action
Author:
Kyle Banker
Publisher:
Manning
Publisher Summary:
MongoDB in Action is a comprehensive guide to MongoDB for application developers. The book begins by explaining what makes MongoDB unique and describing its ideal use cases. A series of tutorials designed for MongoDB mastery then leads into detailed examples for leveraging MongoDB in e-commerce, social networking, analytics, and other common applications.
Review:
I was tinkering with a Node.js application over Christmas, and arrived at a point where I needed to implement a database into my app. MongoDB seems to be the DBMS of choice for Node developers, so I bought MongoDB in Action to learn a bit more about it.
I wanted a book that would get me through the introductory content fast, and would enable me to be productive in as short a time as possible. Thankfully, the author had similar goals in mind when writing the book, and split the book up into three parts: Getting Started; Application Development in MongoDB; and MongoDB Mastery.
Part One begins by discussing the origins, history and evolution of the project; and then goes on to discuss why you would choose to use MongoDB over, for example, a key/value store, or SQL. This is followed by an introduction to the JavaScript shell and some of the core CRUD (create, read, update, delete) operations. The explanation of the core concepts is accompanied by the development of a simple application with Ruby. I personally don’t know a lot of Ruby, but the examples were easy to follow, and helped me understand how a similar implementation would work in Node.
Part Two delves deeper into MongoDB’s document data model and query language. The author explains how to design, create and manipulate documents and collections using the JavaScript shell, and then illustrates how you would implement this in practice by building an e-commerce application. The example application is quite extensive – it covers products, product categories, users, orders and product reviews. Any potential issues are highlighted, and any workarounds and solutions are discussed.
Part Three covers advanced topics; it is aimed at anyone who might have a hand in database administration. This section covers replication, sharding, and hardware setup, in addition to indexing and query performance optimisation techniques. As a NoSQL novice building relatively small web applications, scale doesn’t feature highly on my list of priorities. However, I enjoyed learning about the problems that normalised data models face when scaling (it seems like the best you can do is stick Memcached in front of the database and upgrade your hardware), and the advantages of a denormalised data model (horizontal scaling) in this regard. I also enjoyed the section on indexing and performance optimisation; the discussion of the need for efficient indices, and how redundant indices can significantly hamper query performance was particularly instructive.
Overall:
First off, I wouldn’t recommend this book to anyone without a reasonable knowledge of JavaScript, or at least reasonable proficiency in object-oriented programming. A passing familiarity with Ruby is also helpful, but not required. The application examples created by the author really help you to grasp the fundamentals, it would be a more difficult read if you couldn’t follow them.
The book is well organised – I didn’t feel the need to read parts out of order to make sense of things. Chapters Five and Six were my favourite chapters: they explain the nuts and bolts of MongoDB, and quickly get you building a real-world, practical application. They were particularly instructive on how to implement CRUD functionality, and the design patterns provided continue to be useful.
The author set out to create a book that would take a developer from being a MongoDB novice, to being a “master” of MongoDB. After reading the book, I wouldn’t exactly call myself a master, but I’m certainly confident enough now to use MongoDB now in my applications, without worrying whether I might’ve been better off using MySQL.