Creating nodes and relationships

Unlike other query languages for graph databases such as Gremlin (https://tinkerpop.apache.org/gremlin.html) or AQL (ArangoDB), Cypher was built to have a syntax similar to SQL, in order to ease the transition for developers and data scientists used to the structured query language.

Like many tools in the Neo4j universe, Cypher's name comes from the movie The Matrix released in 1999: Neo is the main character. Apoc is also a character from this movie.

Managing databases with Neo4j Desktop

It is assumed you already have experience with Neo4j Desktop. This is the easiest tool to manage your Neo4j graphs, the installed plugins, and applications. I recommend creating a new project for this book, in which we are going to create several databases. In the following screenshot, I have created a project named Hands-On-Graph-Analytics-with-Neo4j, containing two databases: Test graph and USA:

Throughout this book, we will use Neo4j Browser, which is an application...