Welcome to the wonderful world of Elasticsearch—a great full text search and analytics engine. It doesn't matter if you are new to Elasticsearch and full text search in general or if you have experience. We hope that by reading this book you'll be able to learn and extend your knowledge of Elasticsearch. As this book is also dedicated to beginners, we decided to start with a short introduction to full text search in general and after that, a brief overview of Elasticsearch.

The first thing we need to do with Elasticsearch is install it. With many applications, you start with the installation and configuration and usually forget the importance of those steps. We will try to guide you through these steps so that it becomes easier to remember. In addition to this, we will show you the simplest way to index and retrieve data without getting into too many details. By the end of this chapter, you will have learned the following topics: