Jérôme Baton - Learning Neo4j 3.x: effective data modeling, performance tuning and data visualization techniques in Neo4j

BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI

Copyright 2017 Packt Publishing

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First published: August 2014

Second Edition: October 2017

Production reference: 1171017

ISBN 978-1-78646-614-3

www.packtpub.com

Jrme Baton started hacking computers at the age of skin problems, gaming first then continued his trip by self-learning Basic on Amstrad CPC, peaking on coding a full screen horizontal starfield, and messing the interlace of the video controller so that sprites appeared twice as high in horizontal beat'em up games. Disks were three inches for 178 Kb then.

Then, for gaming reasons, he switched to Commodore Amiga and its fantastic AMOS Basic. Later caught by seriousness and studies, he wrote Turbo Pascal, C, COBOL, Visual C++, and Java on PCs and mainframes at university, and even Logo in high school. Then, Java happened and he became a consultant, mostly on backend code of websites in many different businesses.

Jrme authored several articles in French on Neo4j, JBoss Forge, an Arduino workshop for Devoxx4Kids, and reviewed kilos of books on Android. He has a weakness for wordplay, puns, spoonerisms, and Neo4j that relieves him from join(t) pains.

Jrme also has the joy to teach in French universities, currently at I.U.T de Paris, Universit Paris V - Ren Descartes (Neo4j, Android), and Universit de Troyes (Neo4j), where he does his best to enterTRain the students.

When not programming, Jrme enjoys photography, doing electronics, everything DIY, understanding how things work, trying to be clever or funny on Twitter, and spends a lot of time trying to understand his kids and life in general.

Rik Van Bruggen is the VP of Sales for Neo Technology for Benelux, UK, and the Nordic region. He has been working for startup companies for most of his career, including eCom Interactive Expertise, SilverStream Software, Imprivata, and Courion. While he has an interest in technology, his real passion is business and how to make technology work for a business. He lives in Antwerp, Belgium, with his wife and three lovely kids, and enjoys technology, orienteering, jogging, and Belgian beer.

I would like to thank many people for this project that is truly a great personal achievement for me.

First of all, Rik Van Bruggen, who is the original author of this book and literally, the giant on whose shoulders I stand. Secondly, Vinay and Jagruti from Packt Publishing for their patience with a slow writer.

Thank you, William LyOn, Cdric FauVEt, Mark NEedham, BenOit Simard, Michael Hunger, Craig Taverner, and Jim Webber from Neo4j for their help and sharing their knowledge over the last few years on Stack Overflow, on Slack, or in person.

This would not have been possible if I myself had not had inspiring teachers such as Daniel 'DG' Guillaume, Franoise Meunier, Florence Fessy-Mesatfa, and Jrme Fessy from IUT de Paris, and Dr. Robert T Hughes, Richard N Griffith, and Graham Winstanley from the University of Brighton.

Going further in the past, there are more teachers from whom I learned pedagogy and inspired me to share; I remember you, Mrs. Legrand, Mrs. Viala, and Mr. Bouhadda. Also, not being a native English speaker, I was at first very bad at speaking English. Extra energy from Mrs Goddard and Mrs Maluski really unlocked this second language for me.

Teachers change lives!

Also thanks to the doctors of my national health service without whom I would be a souvenir already. Vive la Scurit Sociale!

Basically, I would like to thank all the people I learned from, be they teachers or not. Including my students.

Thank you, Romin Irani (@iRomin), my friend--you are an example.

Thank you, Anny Nam, you are a truly shining person.

Above all, love you, kiddos!

I really should make a graph of all the people I would like to thank.

Taffy Brecknock has worked in the IT industry for more than 20 years. During his career, he has worked as a software developer, managed development teams, and has been responsible for application design and more recently systems architecture.

He has held roles with both public and private sector organizations. While working with the Australian Government, Taffy got first-hand exposure to the use of connected data in law enforcement. After using relational database systems as the data repository, he is experienced in the short comings of using this paradigm to model such systems.

After learning about graph databases, specifically Neo4j, he has become extremely interested in the many different applications of this technology. He feels that there are few problems in today's business world that cannot benefit from being modeled in a graph.