I was very happy to see a new book released on the Neo4j subject, which was shortly after I read Learning Neo4j which I reviewed here. I just feel it is a very good timing for the release and that these books need to be read in this sequence, first is because Learning Neo4j is very inspirational in addition to teaching Neo4j basics, and also showing what implementations this database can have in real life.

I must say right away that Neo4j Essentials goes beyond just the essentials, and it will become immediately apparent that Sumit has an in depth knowledge of both Neo4j and enterprise architecture. So you will have a good company.

In terms of setting up your environment, it is uncomplicated, as a bonus, Neo4j comes as a free version which is all you want to learn it, and then build a prototype. Be posted Neo4j will require Java (but not its SDK) because Neo4j itself is built in Java. Oracle Java 7 or newer specifically. As a side note, Neo4j can be even embedded into your standalone application.

To be efficient with the book and technology and make the most out of the book I suggest to familiarize yourself with REST and get an IDE like Eclipse or IntelliJ to run Java code samples from the book. I found them very valuable.

So back to the book, while not exactly structured the way I expected it to be laid out (e.g. troubleshooting and maintenance related items appear early in the book) it actually allows you to navigate efficiently and the content is chained logically.

There are plenty of examples in the book covering various aspects of data processing. While most examples are not very exiting I suspect they serve a good starting point in one’s journey toward efficient processing and representation of related data. I must say the author made special emphasis on covering the newer features of the last data base release (Neo4j 2.0).

The most interesting item discussed in the book to my taste was Spring, it is just often not covered in even books dedicated to Java. Apparently Spring supports Neo4j, strongly. What it means, you can build enterprise grade, data rich web applications. Another awesome topic is clustering.

This book dedicates a lot of details with attention to deployment, maintenance, writing code for performance, aspect oriented programming and more, but just enough at the same time to build a reliable implementation of a modern enterprise grade database centric application.

I am sure this book will be of much help to many of these who embark on a wonderful journey with Neo4j!