Cassandra The Definitive Guide 3rd Edition by Jeff Carpenter, Eben Hewitt

Rating: 4.5 of 5

First be aware this is not a general tech book. It is very specifically about Cassandra. I have not read the first or second editions of this book, so I don’t have a frame of reference to compare across editions.

I did not read 100% of the chapters. A few that I was less interested in on security and maintenance I skimmed.

What I liked about the book was its comprehensiveness. Using this book you get a pretty good understanding of pretty much every feature and component of apache Cassandra. I’m glad that the authors provided multiple chapters on data modeling for cassandra and although the example (using hotel rooms) is pretty boring it does the job adequately.

What I didn’t like about the book is that they are too willing to present features such as secondary indexes and materialized views as safe. Various blog posts from respected sources such as “The Last Pickle” recommend disabling these features in production and indicate they are unsafe at any speed.

If I didn’t have some background in Relational Databases the book would be harder to read as well because the authors more or less assume a pretty intimate familiarity with the relational model. I think this was fine, but some readers would not like this.

All in all Cassandra The Definitive Guide is a excellent book for learning Cassandra and getting a introduction to NoSQL. I recommend it to anyone with this goal in mind.

My chapter by chapter notes on the book can be found here