Best Free NoSQL Books

CouchDB: The Definitive Guide

By J. Chris Anderson, Jan Lehnardt, and Noah Slater  (272 pages)

The Little MongoDB Book

By Karl Seguin (66 pages)

The Little MongoDB Book is a free book introducing MongoDB.

Chapters cover:

• The Basics.
• Updating – replace verses $set, update operators, upserts, and multiple updates.
• Mastering Find – field selection, ordering, paging, and count.
• Data Modeling – no joins, arrays and embedded documents, denormalization, and more.
• When To Use MongoDB – flexible schema, writes, durability, full text search, transactions, data processing, geospatial, and tools.
• Aggregating Data – aggregation pipeline, and MapReduce.
• Performance and Tools – indexes, explain, replication, sharding, stats, profiler, and backups and restore.

The Little MongoDB Book book is licensed under the Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported license.

There are translations for Russian, Chinese, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, and German.

A Little Riak Book

By Eric Redmond & John Daily (134 pages)

Riak is an open-source, distributed key/value database for high availability, fault-tolerance, and near-linear scalability.

This is not an “install and follow along” guide. This is a “read and comprehend” guide. According to the authors, the most important section of this book is the concepts chapter.

After laying the theoretical groundwork, the authors move onto helping developers use Riak, by learning how to query it and tinker with some settings. Finally, they cover the basic details that operators should know, such as how to set up a Riak cluster, configure some values, use optional tools, and more.

This work is licensed under the Creative-Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

The Little Redis Book

By Karl Seguin (31 pages)

The best way to learn Redis is still to start by understanding the fundamentals presented in this book.

The book is many years old, but still relevant.

Chapters cover:

• The Basics – covers the building blocks including databases, commands, keys, and values, then moving on to querying, memory and persistence, and putting it together.
• The Data Structures – covers strings, hashes, lists, sets, and sorted sets.
• Leveraging Data Structures – examines big O notation, pseudo multi key queries, references and indexes, round trips and pipelining, transactions, and keys anti-pattern.
• Beyond the Data Structures – expiration, publication and subscriptions, monitor and slow log, sort, and scan.
• Lua Scripting – covers eval, script management, libraries, atomic, and administration.
• Administration – configuration, authentication, size limitations, replication, backups, and scaling and Redis cluster.

The Little Redis Book is licensed under the Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported license.

There are also Russian and Italian translations available.