I’ve been doing a lot of Elasticsearch work at my fulltime job and I’m liking it very much (Actually in San Francisco for an Elasticsearch conference right now). That being said … I started reading this great article by Jon Tai about how to use Elasticsearch as a supplement to your database to get quicker results for unstructured/complex queries, then I started to look at the rest of his blog posts about Elasticsearch and quickly realized that if you’re trying to get up to speed with Elasticsearch, there isn’t clearer, more easily digestable writing on the web about the basics of Lucene and Elasticsearch.

Trust me, I know. I’ve been screwing with ES for the last six months or so, and the knowledge I have is pieced together is from numerous google searches, Stackoverflow questions,  random one-off blogposts about Elasticsearch, Tire or/and videos from the Elasticsearch site.

So once you actually get ES setup on your dev machine, go get yourself a good cup of whatever and then snuggle up with the following (in this order).
– Testing Lucene Analyzers with elasticsearch
– Lucene Scoring and elasticsearch’s _all Field
Then watch this 40 minute video by Elasticsearch creator, Shay Banon, that explains the way Elasticsearch is designed and how to use it to your advantage
– Big Data, Search and Analytics (I’ve watched this 3 times since last August and I pick up something new each time)

Cheers.