An approach to identify books for the initial learning of the Elastic Stack and its results

Abstract

While we prepared an educational course on information retrieval and the search engines, wrote a manual to it, the problem of choosing books of the Elastic Stack for the its initial learning arose. We found 12 books on this topic. We introduce an approach to identify books for the initial learning of the Elastic Stack. The method includes the following steps: (1) development of a way to evaluate the suitability of books for the initial learning of the Elastic Stack; (2) evaluating of the completeness of the content of sections using experts; (3) an additional study of books using the calculated values of the total completeness of sections and clustering; (4) formulation of the conclusion about books that are most suitable for the initial learning of the Elastic Stack. Development of the way for evaluating the suitability of books for the initial learning of the Elastic Stack consists of the following steps: (1) selection of the sections necessary for learning of the Elastic Stack; (2) the development of a completeness assessment scale; (3) determination of the values of parameters of completeness of the exposition of sections of books on the developed scale. We select the following sections for books and determine their content: search, aggregation, improvement of search, scripts, internal structure of Elasticsearch, indexes and documents, Logstash, and Kibana. The author of the article and attracted experts determined the values of the completeness of the sections. We calculate of the total completeness of sections and cluster into three groups. Based on the results of these actions, we conclude the books of the authors of R. Gheorghe et al.; G. Gormley, Z. Tonga; M. Konda; A. Paro; A. Srivastava are suitable for the initial learning of the Elastic Stack.