add couchdb guide notes

2010/10/31/couchdb-guide-intro.md

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+# CouchDB Guide Intro
+
+I'm doing a full reading of the [CouchDB Guide](http://guide.couchdb.org/draft/index.html). I started from the beginning yesterday and just finished Chapter 5.
+
+* slug: couchdb-guide-intro
+* url: http://guide.couchdb.org/draft/index.html
+* tags: couchdb, curl, intro, views
+* date: 2010-10-31 11:59PM
+* location: Home
+
+# [Foreward](http://guide.couchdb.org/draft/foreword.html)
+
+I found the foreward by Damien Katz very inspirational. It got me thinking about the ever-increasing importance of
+databases.
+
+# [Chapter 1: Why CouchDB?](http://guide.couchdb.org/draft/why.html)
+
+* relaxing
+* modeling data
+* operations: query, map, combine, filter
+* A Better Fit
+* real-world data & real-world documents
+* building blocks
+* replication
+* fallacies of distributed computing
+* local data
+
+* Modeling the real world is an important challenge
+* Got me thinking about how CouchDB can get people to set up things they might not otherwise set up.
+
+# [Chapter 2: Eventual Consistency](http://guide.couchdb.org/draft/consistency.html)
+
+* working with the grain
+* making good tradeoffs for local computing
+* distributed consistency
+
+# [Chapter 3: Getting Started](http://guide.couchdb.org/draft/tour.html)
+
+* creating databases
+* futon
+* an introduction to views
+
+# [Chapter 4: The Core API](http://guide.couchdb.org/draft/api.html)
+
+* server
+* databases
+* documents
+* attachments
+* replication
+
+* I followed along, mostly on Cloudant
+* I didn't get replication working on Cloudant right away, so I did that example locally. I'll look into getting it
+  working on Cloudant later.
+* I learned a lot about the headers. For example, if I don't tell it that I only want application/json, it will send me
+  text/plain for the mimetype.
+* I liked the album example
+* This made me comfortable with the idea of creating lots of databases for playing around, to minimize breaking things
+
+## Attachments
+
+It clicked that attachments are truly part of the documents that contain them. When attachments are changed, the
+document's revision id is changed. Attachments don't have a revision id of their own. Attachments use the same
+Etag as the documents they're attached to.
+
+This makes me want to use attachments liberally. I'm really liking the idea of extracting JSON from Markdown, HTML, and
+XML.
+
+# [Chapter 5: Design Documents](http://guide.couchdb.org/draft/design.html)
+
+* Code in documents
+  * Yes, CouchDB stores code in JSON
+  * The idea of storing code for other languages, like Ruby, in JSON goes well with the CouchDB model
+* Applications Are Documents
+* Full applications in CouchDB
+  * views, shows, lists
+  * validation functions
+  * change notifications, filters
+  * update handlers for parsing non-JSON input
+  * events, rewrites
+
+# Plan
+
+At the rate I'm going through the book, I hope to finish it in the next week. After this I'd like to read:
+
+* A ruby web development book
+  * Agile Web Development With Rails 3 (I own a copy)
+  * Agile Web Development With Rails 4
+  * The Rails Way by Obie Fernandez
+* A RESTful API book
+  * Service Oriented Design with Ruby and Rails by Paul Dix (I own a copy)
+  * Restful Web Services by Leonard Richardson and Sam Ruby
+* Read JavaScript: The Good Parts more thoroughly