This book contains most of the information you need about CouchDB, or at least as much as can be included about software that hasn't reached 1.0 yet. The authors admit this problem and do their best to prep you for it. Unfortunately, it is hair-pulling-outly poorly written and an organizational nightmare. It can be likened to Wikipedia: the information is there, but it is written by people who have no business as editors. The writing feels very crowd-sourced and jumps randomly between topics, so reading this book linearly (you know, like a book) will leave your head spinning. Also, many of the sentences are "here's a complicated and extremely important idea, but don't worry about it until later." It has a big problem with progressive disclosure; it throws random terms at you and then explains nothing about them, assuming you'll remember how it fits into the bigger picture 70 pages later.
The book also does a poor job of explaining certain things in any depth. For example, after detailing what you think is a complete overview of CouchDB, the book introduces Couch's "design document" concept without any previous reference. No information is given on how design documents relate to your database(s) or how you're supposed to set them up vs your data structure. It is like describing what a hammer looks like without explaining that you actually need to hit nails with it.
There is no followable coherency as the book struggles to explain how maps, reduces, views and designs are used. It almost feels as if the authors were just writing things as they came to their minds, and didn't spend any time creating a layout for the book and topic introduction. May god help you as you struggle to follow the maze of thought this book presents.
I absolutely recommend against buying this book until the complete rewrite second edition comes out. There is absolutely no justification of the current $34 asking price. It is also (legally) available for free online. If you want an actual book, wait it out if you can, because this edition is an amateur mess.