Show HN: I wrote a book about Elasticsearch | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I wrote a book about Elasticsearch

elasticsearchbook.com

66 pointsgxjoe5 comments

Hello all, After hundreds of hours spent on answering questions on stackoverflow, I observed a few barriers of entry that Elasticsearch newbies struggle with. It's first and foremost the formidable query language.

Most of us learn a new technology by reverse-engineering what works elsewhere. So I've published a handbook with carefully curated practical examples that demystify the query language and provide a solid foundation to build on.

Hope it helps!

Cheers

Interesting, why did you go the route of publishing on notion vs a traditional e-book format?

Thanks for asking! A couple of reasons.

From my perspective: • I like writing in Notion. It feels like I'm getting more writing done than I do elsewhere. • It hits the sweet spot as it allows me to A) write & format code-focused content, B) link to other (sub)chapters, and C) create compelling guides thanks to the variety of "building blocks". • It's nicely designed and permits customization (blocks, callouts, colors, font families, etc) while sensibly constraining you so that you don't go "too far" with the design. • I can assign read-only permissions relatively easily (I wrote about how I automated it here: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-i-published-a-notion-e...). • Last but not least, I studied Janel's journey on publishing a Notion resource (basically a dashboard) on Indiehackers: (https://www.indiehackers.com/product/newsletter-operating-sy...) and saw that it works! So I did my own thing.

From my readers' perspective: • Ppl usually don't read Elasticsearch guides on a kindle on a beach in Southern France. They do it on the computer while integrating / debugging something. So they pull up the online Notion workspace, search thru it, and (hopefully) gain some insights. • Since it's online, it can be updated / extended / typo-corrected at any time. • The handbook includes images that won't work on kindle and videos that don't really work in PDFs. • Last but not least, ppl can't really share my work online. Sure, they can do screenshots, save the page as html, copy the text etc, but it's not as straightforward as dumping a PDF on dropbox.

BTW I'm tracking my ebook "mini journey" on Indiehackers too, if you're into that sort of thing: https://www.indiehackers.com/product/the-elasticsearch-handb...

P.S.: I do plan to eventually move my handbook out of notion and create my own member-only workspace that'll look similar to Lee Robinson's blog (https://leerob.io/blog/monorepo-lerna-yarn-workspaces). But the emphasis is on eventually ;)

Well this was unfortunate. I have purchased the book, but it was not immediately obvious anywhere that by "book" you meant a third party website.

Is there anyway to get access without signing up to Notion?

If not, sadly I won't be reading it, but that's my problem not yours.

May I suggest adding a "What you will get" section where you clearly state that people won't be able to read without signing up to Notion?

Edit: I just saw that you have that listed under the "How does it work?" FAQ - My bad.

@rhamzeh yes, it's all in the FAQs. If you're not satisfied, I'll shoot you an email and we can resolve it.

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