MongoDB Applied Design Patterns is a book that I will read again. I generally don’t say that about technical books, but the strengths of this work are such that many parts merit a second reading.
This book is for folks with some experience using MongoDB. If you’ve never worked with MongoDB before, you should start with another book. Python developers, in particular, will benefit from studying this book, as most of the code examples are in that language. As long as you have some object-oriented programming experience and have worked with the MongoDB shell, though, you’ll have little difficulty following the code examples.
Another group of people who will strongly benefit from this book are those with only relational database experience. The author does a thorough job, particularly in the early sections of the book, of comparing MongoDB with traditional relational database management systems.
I particularly liked the author’s discussion of transactions, in chapter 3. The example is complex, and not a simple debit-credit discussion. You understand through this example that you must write your own transaction management when you give up using a relational database system. To me, this is an important point, and I’m glad that the author spends so much time on this example.
Some of the use cases presented are similar to those in the MongoDB manual, in particular chapters four, five, and six. The remaining use cases go beyond what is described in that manual. All of the discussion in these use cases is thorough. There is typically an explanation of the data model (schema design) and then of standard CRUD operations. The author also goes into not-so-typical operations, like aggregation. I was particularly pleased that each use case includes sharding concerns.
In summary, I highly recommend this book. It’s great to see MongoDB being adopted for so many different uses.
