If you're new to elasticsearch and the “information retrieval” / “fulltext search” in general, my advice would be to check these resources first, before trying out tutorials on specific features:
- The Your Data, Your Search, ElasticSearch presentation from EURUKO 2011
- The ElasticSearch - A Distributed Search Engine talk by Shay Bannon together with accompanying scripts
- The Lucene in Action book (at least the general chapters on the indexing, analysis, tokenization, and constructing queries)
