Writing books takes a lot of time, and quite a bit of effort. Which is why I was delighted when Itamar Syn-Hershko decided to write the RavenDB in Action book.

You can now get a 39% discount for the book (both physical and electronic versions) using the coupon code: 39ravendb

Itamar has worked at Hibernating Rhinos for several years, mostly dealing with Lucene integration, but really all over the place. Off the top of my head, Itamar is responsible for Spatial searches in RavenDB, he wrote the first periodic backup implementation as well as the “backup to cloud” functionality, implemented the server side document json (which supports cheap cloning and is key for some very interesting performance optimizations) and in general worked all over the RavenDB codebase.

In other words, this is a person who knows RavenDB quite well, and he has done an excellent in passing on that knowledge with the RavenDB in Action book. This book is likely to be the most up to date resource for getting started with RavenDB.

Itamar has covered working with RavenDB, how indexes work, and how to work with indexes (two distinctly different issues ) and most importantly, in my opinion, document based modeling.

Users bringing relational modeling to RavenDB is usually the most common reason they run into trouble. So document modeling is quite important, and Itamar did a good job in covering it. Both as an independent concept and by contrasting that with relational model and discussing the cons and pros as it relates to RavenDB.

And, naturally, the book also cover the fun parts of working with RavenDB.

• Replication for high availability and load balancing
• Sharding for scalability and increased throughput
• Geo spatial queries
• Full text, more like this and reporting queries
• The advanced API options and how (and when) to use it.

There is even a full chapter talking about how you can extend RavenDB on both the client side and the server side.

Overall, I highly recommend the RavenDB in Action book, if you are using RavenDB, or even if you just want to learn about it, this is a great resource.

And remember that you can get a 39% discount for the book (both physical and electronic versions) using the coupon code: 39ravendb