With such a fast-moving target as a pre-1.0 app like CouchDB, this book does a good job of bringing you up to speed on CouchDB and some of its supporting tools like CouchApp. It is a noticeably gentler pace than the definitive CouchDB guide (focusing on brevity and concepts) and tries to give more explanation in a step-by-step fashion.



However, overall the book doesn't deal with the "why" so much as the "what". This is good to get you started with, but will not be a book I would likely refer back to much. As a niggling point, there are small but annoying differences between code & corresponding text in several places, and each chapter seems to use a different example. Some continuity would both smooth things out, and make the book feel more cohesive. The introduction to javascript and JSON was useful to me, but more skilled web 2.0 people will not see the need for this. As a beginner, the RESTful approach could have been worth elaborating on. Some parts of the book feel faster-paced than others - perhaps depending on your existing knowledge.



Finally, I was less than impressed with the PDF version of this book. The images are low-res and therefore largely illegible, especially in the later stages of the book. A lot of the images were unnecessary. The sample code can't be cut and pasted, which for me was one of the top 2 reasons to grab the PDF version. This could be the Mac Preview app I am using but still it's annoying that you can't download the code snippets from anywhere, nor cut'n'paste the content from the PDF.





The publisher could easily address the points above, especially in the online version. This is a good get-started book but will likely suffer from rapid aging as the CouchDB ecosystem continues to grow.