The title of this book, Learning Neo4j, is a really good title in many ways. On one hand, it reflects my own personal experience with Neo4j over the past couple of years and more. As I fell deeply in love with graph technology, Neo4j kept on providing me with new fascinating things to learn about and explore. This book, in more than one way, is a summary of that learning experience—it's the tale of my learning of Neo4j.
But the book is also supposed to provide you with lots of good starting points to get going with this technology more quickly. I know for a fact that finding learning resources on these types of technologies is not always easy, and that's really what drove me personally to spend many late nights, weekends, and holidays to put together this book to accelerate your learning of Neo4j.
Chapter 1, Graphs and Graph Theory – an Introduction, provides you with some background information on graphs to help you understand where the technology behind Neo4j came from.
Chapter 2, Graph Databases – Overview, will try to explain how the theory of the previous chapter is used to create a new, different kind of database that is "standing on the shoulders of giants". We are going to be basing ourselves on several decades of database technologies, of course.
Chapter 3, Getting Started with Neo4j, gives you an overview of several of Neo4j's key characteristics, and then helps you get going with the tool on different on-premise and cloud-based platforms.
Chapter 4, Modeling Data for Neo4j, will provide you with an introduction to data modeling for graph databases. Before you take your newly acquired tool (discussed in the previous chapter) for a spin, you need to think about the data model, just as you would with any other database.
Chapter 5, Importing Data into Neo4j, will give you a good look at the different options and considerations to import data into your newly created model (discussed in Chapter 4, Modeling Data for Neo4j). It will show you some of the different import techniques in detail as well.
Chapters 6, Use Case Example – Recommendations, will provide detailed examples of use cases for Neo4j that seem to have become quite commonplace in many different industries. This chapter focuses on recommendations.
Chapter 7, Use Case Example – Impact Analysis and Simulation, will take a deep look into the impact analysis use cases of Neo4j.
Chapter 8, Visualizations for Neo4j, will give you an overview of how to integrate the Neo4j graph database with the powerful domain of graph visualizations. We will discuss different alternatives, and point you to different resources to get started with.
Chapter 9, Other Tools Related to Neo4j, will provide you with some pointers to interesting complementary tools that relate to Neo4j, such as data integration tools, business intelligence tools, and modeling tools.
Appendix A, Where to Find More Information Related to Neo4j, gives a basic introduction to Cypher.
Appendix B, Getting Started with Cypher, discusses the Neo4j query language that we are using throughout the book.
This book can be read without any additional resources; however, we recommend access to some physical lab resources to install Neo4j Community Edition on. You can download that software from http://neo4j.com/download/ at your convenience.
A reasonable and recommended lab setup can be one on a machine with a dual or quad-core processor with 8 GB of RAM. A system with a lesser configuration would probably also work, but the recommended one will make it more comfortable for you.
Also note that you need OpenJDK 7 (http://openjdk.java.net/) or Oracle Java 7 (http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/index.html) installed on your machine.
If you are an IT professional or developer who wants to get started in the field of graph databases, this is the book for you. Anyone with prior experience with SQL in the relational database world will very quickly feel at ease with Neo4j and its Cypher query language and learn a lot from this book.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "As explained previously, the output of the batch importer is not what we will immediately see on our Neo4j server. In fact, the output is just a test.db directory."
A block of code is set as follows:
//Loading CSV with Rels
load csv with headers from
"file:/your/path/to/rels.csv"
as rels
match (from {id: rels.From}), (to {id: rels.To})
create from-[:REL {type: rels.`Relationship Type`}]->to
return from, toAny command-line input or output is written as follows:
cd /path/to/your/Neo4j/server curl http://dist.Neo4j.org/jexp/shell/Neo4j-shell-tools-2.0.zip -o Neo4j-shell-tools.zip unzip Neo4j-shell-tools.zip -d lib
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "The Admin panel shows us the way, and gives immediate access to this particular Neo4j instance's browser interface."
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