MongoDB in Action, Second Edition
Covers MongoDB version 3.0
Kyle Banker
Manning, paperback
Yes, this updated edition of MongoDB in Action is aimed at software developers. However, the book wisely does not ignore those of us who are more casual users of MongoDB.
Indeed, this is a fine how-to book for MongoDB newcomers and casual users, too, particularly if you are patient and willing to read through an introductory chapter focusing on “MongoDB’s history, design goals, and application use cases.”
Many people, of course, just want to jump straight into downloading the software, running it, and playing with it for a while before getting down to any serious stuff such as application use cases. So this book’s Appendix A is the place to go first, so you can get MongoDB onto your Linux, Mac, or Windows computer. Then, after MongoDB is installed, you can jump back to Chapter 2 to start learning how to use the JavaScript shell.
After that, things quickly start getting more “practical.” For example, Chapter 3 introduces “Writing programs using MongoDB.” Here, Ruby is employed to work with the MongoDB API. But the author notes: “MongoDB, Inc. provides officially supported, Apache-licensed MongoDB drivers for all of the most popular programming languages. The driver examples in the book use Ruby, but the principles we’ll illustrate are universal and easily transferable to other drivers. Throughout the book we’ll illustrate most commands with the JavaScript shell, but examples of using MongoDB from within an application will be in Ruby.”
I won’t try to sum up everything in this well-written, 13-chapter book. I have used older, 2.X versions of MongoDB in MEAN stack applications. And, separately, I have worked a bit with Ruby and MongoDB. But in each case, I haven’t needed to learn all that much about MongoDB itself, mainly just ensure that it is storing data that can be accessed in the right place and updated, saved or deleted as needed. So this book, written for 3.0.X (and earlier and later) MongoDB releases is an eye-opener for me and one that I will keep around for reference and more learning now that I have upgraded to 3.2.
Part 1 of MongoDB in Action, 2nd edition “provides a broad, practical introduction to MongoDB.” Part 2 delivers “a deep exploration of MongoDB’s document data model.” Part 3, meanwhile, examines MongoDB “from the database administrator’s perspective. This means we’ll cover all the things you need to know about performance, deployments, fault tolerance, and scalability.”
The book’s author knows that readers with some MongoDB experience will not read the book straight through. Instead, they will tackle chapters in many different orders and will even skip some chapters. And this is okay. MongoDB in Action: Second Edition is a book many of us will be happy to have handy whenever we need to get a better grip on some new aspect of working with this very popular open-source document database.
One cautionary note: The author points out that “as of MongoDB v3.0, 32-bit binaries will no longer be supported.” Of course, some 3.X 32-bit binaries are still out there, and you can install them. But you will get a lot of warning messages from MongoDB. So, download a 64-bit binary if your system will support it.
