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 searches in general, or if you already have some experience in this. 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 searches in general, and after that, a brief overview of Elasticsearch.

Please remember that Elasticsearch is a rapidly changing of software. Not only are features added, but the Elasticsearch core functionality is also constantly evolving and changing. We try to keep up with these changes, and because of this we are giving you the third edition of the book dedicated to Elasticsearch 2.x.

The first thing we need to do with Elasticsearch is install and configure it. With many applications, you start with the installation and configuration and usually forget the importance of these 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 going into too much detail. The first chapter will take you on a quick ride through Elasticsearch and the full text search world. By the end of this chapter, you will have learned the following topics: