I'm looking at the guide and I see a lot of explanation but little to nothing in the way of clear, simple instructions that will cover the most typical basic use cases.

Of course Elasticsearch has many features and many different types of interfaces, but most people don't need to use most of those features, and having some example code available for a few common languages/platforms would be very useful.

Elasticsearch has done a great job of streamlining the use of Lucene and of course generally making many improvements, but based on the documentation I have seen including this new book, Elasticsearch must derive most of its income through consulting or support, and providing simple instructions obviously is a direct conflict of interest.

I believe that the average user is like me: they want to index some documents and then search the full text. They want a straightforward way to connect one or two search boxes on their web application to Elasticsearch and then retrieve some useful results. They do not want to learn the nuances of different engines or search interfaces. They do not want to read a book.