Book Review: MongoDB in Action

Overview
 I am a big fan of Manning Publications books and so when it came time to do some personal research on NoSQL, I started with the Manning website to what books they had that covered the topic.  I didn't really have any specific requirements, like document model vs key value pairs vs graph database.  I just wanted something fairly current and covering one of the main players in the area.

I found this book on the website and the publication date (2012) helped ensure that I was getting was something current and not a couple years old.  The other nice surprise was the size of the book.  For anyone that's read an 'In Action' book from Manning, you know they generally tend to be fairly large, on the scale of 300-400 page or more.   This book weighs in at 278 pages and that includes 5 appendices!

Contents
The book is broken down into 3 parts:

1. Getting Started, which covers about 50 pages talking about MongoDB at a high-level, the core server, tools, replication, the JavaScript shell and writing programs and using drivers to interact with the database.
2. Application Development in MongoDB covers principles of schema design, MongoDB databases, collections, Mongo's query language, updates atomic operations and deletes.
3. MongoDB Mastery covers index and query optimization, replication, sharding and deployment. 

Summary
An excellent book by Kyle Banker and yet another excellent book from the folks at Manning Publications.  I blew through the first two parts of the book, eager to learn more about NoSQL and MongoDB.  The author does an excellent job explaining concepts within MongoDB and backs up his statements with the reasons why things are done the way they are.

It took a bit longer for me to get through part 3 of the book, no fault of the author or book.  Since this was really my own personal research and there is no way I will be implementing MongoDB or NoSQL at my day job, other than maybe some small personal tools/utilities, the topics of replication and sharding just didn't have the same appeal as learning about the core server, the query language and schema design!

Overall, I would recommend this book to anyone interested in learning about MongoDB.