The first thing that I noticed (and absolutely loved!) is that there are no instructions in the book on how to install any of these databases. No instructions on how to use a shell. And no copies of tables, commands, etc. that I can find on the web. The book assumes (rightly) that you already have some technical skills and are smart enough to find these things on the web. If you do not know your way around Linux and cannot find & follow installation instructions, then this is not the right book for you anyway.
I have not read all of the chapters yet. I have a specific need and have read the chapters on Riak, MondogDB, CouchDB, and Neo4J. The chapters are good - there is enough information on each database to allow me to explore using curl, javascript, mongo, gremlin, etc. I found the examples actually useful, not some meaningless drivel. And great starting points for me to start doing my own explorations.
The chapters are broken up into 3 days of exercises. It doesn't take three days - you can easily do each chapter in a few hours at most, though I found myself down the rabbit hole several times as I tried various things.
The content in the chapters I read is to-the-point and useful. I actually found the chapter on CouchDB more useful to me that the entire "CouchDB - The Definitive Guide" book, which has an "interesting" organization. The CouchDB chapter - like the others - seems much more organized and follows a sequence of steps that made sense to me.
In summary, I like the book. I have a few of the "Definitive Guides" and I find some of them just sort of ramble. If you are technical, comfortable with Linux & using the command line, then "Seven Databases in Seven Weeks" is a great way to quickly get some insight on a few of the large number of NoSQL/open source database available.
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