Rafał Kuć is a born team leader and a Software Developer. Working as a Consultant and a Software Engineer at Sematext Group, Inc., he concentrates on open source technologies such as Apache Lucene, Solr, ElasticSearch, and Hadoop stack. He has more than 11 years of experience in various software branches—from banking software to e-commerce products. He is mainly focused on Java, but open to every tool and programming language that will make the achievement of his goal easier and faster. He is also one of the founders of the solr.pl site, where he tries to share his knowledge and help people to resolve their problems with Solr and Lucene. He is also a speaker for various conferences around the world such as Lucene Eurocon, Berlin Buzzwords, ApacheCon, and Lucene Revolution.
Rafał began his journey with Lucene in 2002 and it wasn't love at first sight. When he came back to Lucene in late 2003, he revised his thoughts about the framework and saw the potential in search technologies. Then Solr came and this was it. He started working with ElasticSearch in the middle of 2010. Currently, Lucene, Solr, ElasticSearch, and information retrieval are his main points of interest.
Rafał is also an author of Solr 3.1 Cookbook, the update to it—Solr 4.0 Cookbook, and is a co-author of ElasticSearch Server all published by Packt Publishing.
The book you are holding in your hands was something that I wanted to write after finishing the ElasticSearch Server book and I got the opportunity. I wanted not to jump from topic to topic, but concentrate on a few of them and write about what I know and share the knowledge. Again, just like the ElasticSearch Server book, I couldn't include all topics I wanted, and some small details that are more or less important, depending on the use case, had to be left aside. Nevertheless, I hope that by reading this book you'll be able to easily get into all the details about ElasticSearch and underlying Apache Lucene, and I also hope that it will let you get the desired knowledge easier and faster.
Marek Rogoziński is a Software Architect and a Consultant with more than 10 years of experience. His specialization involves solutions based on open source search engines such as Solr and ElasticSearch and software stack for big data analytics including Hadoop, Hbase, and Twitter Storm.
He is also a co-founder of the solr.pl site which publishes information and tutorials about Solr and Lucene library and is the co-author of the ElasticSearch Server book published by Packt Publishing.
He currently holds a position of Chief Technology Officer in a company building products based on the processing and analysis of large streams of input data.
Just like the previous book, writing Mastering ElasticSearch was a difficult task. To tell the truth, it was much harder not only because of more advanced topics covered in this book, but also because of the constantly introduced changes in the ElasticSearch codebase. The development of it is not going to slow down and literally speaking, every day brings something new. Please remember that this book should be treated as a continuation of the previous book. This means, we have tried to omit all the topics that we had covered before, and we wanted to add everything that was omitted. You can see if you have succeeded yourself. Now it's time to thank everyone.