The primary source of information for Neo4j is, of course, the online body of reference. Some of the most important parts of the Internet that could be of interest for you when getting started with Neo4j will be discussed next.
The Google forum at https://groups.google.com/group/neo4j is a great place to ask questions, discuss experiences, and connect with other users of Neo4j. Because it leverages the Google search capabilities, it tends to be a great place for people to start looking for real-world experiences and advice.
If or when you are looking for specific technical help or assistance, please consider asking a question on Stack Overflow. This is where you can get technical questions answered, either by the Community Management staff of Neo Technology or other volunteering contributors in the Neo4j community. Every question should have a neo4j tag, and then all of these questions and answers can be easily accessed by navigating to http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/neo4j.
For quite some time, the website of the Neo4j community, www.neo4j.org, has been a great resource with easily accessible information about the product, development practices, learning resources, and many other pieces of information. At the time of writing this, the website was about to be significantly redesigned.
At the time of writing of this chapter, Neo Technology was in the process of recreating a new website at www.neo4j.com, which would restructure and make information more accessible for a variety of audiences and give it a more pleasing look and feel. This process would include and merge both community and commercial resources, for both technical and more business-oriented contacts that want to inform themselves on Neo4j.
Many of the Neo4j developers and community members are fervent sharers of information, and much of what they write ends up on the Neo4j Blog. You can access the blog on the newly added blogging section of Neo4j at http://neo4j.com/blog/.
Since summer of 2013, Neo4j community members have started to share and publish some of their graph database models and use cases using a GraphGist. GraphGists use plain text files (formatted in AsciiDoc) available from any public URL (for example, GitHub gists) to create interactive, dynamically rendered graph examples and queries that are evaluated by a Neo4j infrastructure in the background. It allows great documentation and explanation of Neo4j models in an easily understandable way. Visit http://gist.neo4j.org/ for many well-written examples of graph database use cases—there are a lot of them available on the website.
Like many query languages, many users of it want and need to switch back to some kind of a reference for creating, maintaining, and/or troubleshooting specific kinds of queries. Cypher, the Neo4j declarative query language, therefore provides a handy reference page / card that many people turn to for occasional references. Visit http://docs.neo4j.org/ for the most recent version (at the time of writing this, http://docs.neo4j.org/refcard/2.1.2/ is the current one). You can always change the last digits to correspond to the presently generally available version of Neo4j.
We will be including more information on Cypher in Appendix B, Getting Started with Cypher.
There are a number of interesting books on the market today that could provide good follow-up reading, now that you have almost finished Learning Neo4j. A few books to highlight are as follows:
Another good book that specifically covers the Cypher query language is Learning Cypher by Packt Publishing (http://www.packtpub.com/learning-cypher/book).
The O'Reilly book by Jim Webber, Ian Robinson, and Emil Eifrem. This book has been free to download at www.graphdatabases.com for a while, and still provides a good bit of detailed technical information.
A book by OpenCredo's CEO Jonas Parter, published by Manning, Neo4j in Action (http://www.manning.com/partner/).
A book by Michael Hunger and David Montag, published at InfoQ, Good Relationships (http://neo4j.com/books/good-relationships/).
No doubt there are other useful publications, but this should give you a good starting point.