The book you are holding was a new experience for me although it is not the first book I've written. When we started working on it, we thought that we would be able to write about all the functionalities we wanted, but we couldn't have imagined how big ElasticSearch is and how much time it would take to write about it. Finally, we had to choose the topics and hopefully we've chosen wisely and you'll find this book helpful in your work. When I described a single functionality, I tried to write about it like I would like to read about it myself, so I hope that you'll find those descriptions helpful and interesting.

Although I would go the same way if I went back in time, the time of writing this book was not easy for my family, especially because this was not the only book I was working on at the time. Apache Solr 4 Cookbook was also being updated at the same time. The ones that suffered from this the most were my wife, Agnes, and our two lovely kids—our son, Philip, and daughter, Susanna. Without their patience and understanding, writing this book wouldn't have been possible. I would also like to thank my parents and Agnes' parents for their support and help.

I would like to thank all the people involved in creating, developing, and maintaining the ElasticSearch and Lucene projects for their work and passion. Without them this book couldn't have been written.

Finally, a big thanks to all the reviewers on this book. Their in-depth comments and insights have made this book better, at least from my point of view.

Once again, thank you all!

Marek Rogoziński is a software architect and consultant with more than 10 years of experience. His specialization concerns solutions based on open source projects such as Solr and ElasticSearch.

He is also the co-funder of the solr.pl site, publishing information and tutorials about the Solr and Lucene library.

He currently holds the position of Chief Technology Officer in Smartupz, the vendor of the Discourse™ social collaboration software.