What this book covers

Chapter 1, MongoDB – A Database for the Modern Web, takes us on a journey through web, SQL, and NoSQL technologies from inception to current state.

Chapter 2, Schema Design and Data Modeling, teaches schema design for relational databases and MongoDB, and how we can achieve the same goal starting from a different point.

Chapter 3, MongoDB CRUD Operations, gives a bird's-eye view of CRUD operations.

Chapter 4, Advanced Querying, covers advanced querying concepts using Ruby, Python, and PHP, using both the official drivers and an ODM.

Chapter 5, Aggregation, dives deep into the aggregation framework. We also discuss why and when we should use aggregation, as opposed to MapReduce and querying the database.

Chapter 6, Indexing, explores one of the most important properties of every database, which is indexing.

Chapter 7, Monitoring, Backup, and Security, discusses the operational aspects of MongoDB. Monitoring, backup, and security should not be an afterthought but rather a necessary process before deploying MongoDB in a production environment.

Chapter 8, Storage Engines, teaches about different storage engines in MongoDB. We identify the pros and cons of each one and the use cases for choosing each storage engine.

Chapter 9, Harnessing Big Data with MongoDB, shows more about how MongoDB fits into the wider big data landscape and ecosystem.

Chapter 10, Replication, discusses replica sets and how to administer them. Starting from an architectural overview of replica sets and replica set internals around elections, we dive deep into setting up and configuring a replica set.

Chapter 11, Sharding, explores sharding, one of the most interesting features of MongoDB. We start from an architectural overview of sharding and move on to how we can design a shard, and especially choose the right shard key.

Chapter 12, Fault Tolerance and High Availability, tries to fit in the information that we didn't manage to discuss in the previous chapters, and places emphasis on some others.