This book does just what it sets out to do: give developers a whirlwind tour of several different databases and different styles of databases, thereby providing a pretty good tour of the NoSQL landscape. Given the way web technologies have been changing so quickly over the past several years, there’s a real need for these sort of bird’s-eye tours, and I’m glad that such a thing exists. That said, the chapter on HBase was a little sparse and I don’t think I fully appreciated the subtlety of columnar databases as a result - which is odd given that one of the authors has spent a lot of time with HBase (or perhaps this difficulty is born of the author’s proximity to the subject, who knows.) Similarly I found the Neo4J/Gremlin examples a little convoluted, sometimes unnecessarily - for example, the authors seem to like using inbound relationships to determine the type of a node, when it seems to me that marking nodes with a “type” property and filtering on that explicitly would do just as well and be more readable.

Nonetheless - I quite appreciated this whirlwind tour, and by and large found the examples just clear enough to give a flavor of what’s possible. I certainly hope to see more books along these lines in the future.