Customer Reviews

Lucene in Action, Second Edition: Covers Apache Lucene 3.0

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Lucene is an open source, search engine library that provides a sophisticated API that can be used to index documents and provide advanced search capabilities. Although using Lucene is not particularly difficult, like many open source projects, the available documentation leaves something to be desired. This book nicely fills that missing area.

The book starts with an introduction explaining both what Lucene is and also what it isn't. The next couple of chapters show us how to use the Lucene classes to index documents and then search for those documents. The authors next show us how to improve our searches by using different analyzers including how to write our own custom analyzers. Custom analyzers can allow, for example, searches using common misspellings or words that sound alike. The book moves on to look at the advanced search features that are available to the developer as well as explaining how to add your own features into Lucene. Since Lucene works only with text data, the authors next show us how to convert various data formats such as Word documents, HTML documents, and PDFs into text formats to allow Lucene to index and search them. The authors wrap up the main portion of the book with a look at some of the tools and extensions available that can provide some nice additional functionality such as highlighting search words in the found documents. The final chapter is a look at some real-life case studies of Lucene contributed by various authors. Some of the writing here is rather weak and seems, at least in some cases, to be little more than ads for the various sites and products.

The book is very well written and gives a good in-depth exploration of Lucene. The authors give plenty of code snippets showing the features of Lucene and provide a complete application to review as well. Anyone interested in using Lucene and wants more than the little documentation available should consider getting this book. One thing that annoyed me about the book was the constant pushing of JUnit. Most of the code samples include some traces of unit testing and seeing blocks of code with "assertEquals" everywhere was distracting to say the least. The authors should have considered that not everyone is using JUnit and that when you are trying to understand code, additional off-topic lines are simply confusing.

This is a solid, well-written, introduction to Lucene and related technologies. The book starts with an introduction to the architecture of Lucene, replete with a simple sample application, then goes into an in-depth review of the indexing, searching and querying. XML and HTML indexing are also covered. As are performance issues. The last chapter covers related technologies and other implementations of Lucene into other languages.

This is the best book I have seen on Lucene. It's an informative, fun read, that is worth the money if Lucene is central to your application.

Lucene is truly an amazing piece of work. A knowledgeable Java programmer can pick up the API and integrate lucene into their applications very quickly and effectively. There are some excellent examples that come with system, and getting an index built and a search system working is a fun task you can complete in a short afternoon.
There are, however, some conceptual hurdles. Lucene aims to be, and is, an excellent search engine, and nothing more. Surrounding Lucene are a number of other projects and tools for parsing documents, extracting blurbs, highlight results, and so on. On the flip side, Lucene it's self is amazingly configurable. Out of the box is has some excellent defaults, but you can change every aspect of the system.

The "Lucene in Action" book can provide you with the big picture. The book provides excellent examples and give you pointers that will save you time, and make you look (and feel) like you have been developing search systems your whole life. I have the Lucene in Action book now, and I'm using it to re-factor my software application. Had I owned the book at the beginning of my project, I would be six months ahead of where I am today.

This book, although well written, struck me more as a "The Missing Manual" style of book rather than an "In Action" book. Open Source projects are notorious for lacking documentation or scattered "getting started" tutorials that possess poor cohesion (more a fault of the nature of software development, the projects are voluntary and I've never met a software developer who ENJOYED documentation). This book fills the necessary gap and provides in-depth knowledge of the Lucene API and logic flow.

The first chapter begins by describing the importance of search and the history of Lucene (nice intro).

The next six chapters (2 - 7) follow on to describe the pertinent sections of Lucene that encompass its searching engine (very nicely written and useful for ANYONE that wants to expand on what Lucene offers out of the box or needs to diagnose behavior that isn't at first apparently obvious).

Chapter eight describes the Lucene Sandbox where utility programs for Lucene are developed and maintained. This chapter was useful to the extent that it introduced you to several of the more usable items that are in the sandbox at the time of writing but, and as they point out in the introduction to the chapter, the information will undoubtably become outdated within a short matter of time.

Chapter nine, while academic, was not necessarily useful (IMO) to the overall theme of the book.

Chapter ten, again while interesting in a general search engine context, was not overly useful for applying Lucene (at least for my applications).

The indices:
A - encompased the general installation of Lucene (useful information but better placed on the same website where you download the binaries/source)
B - a detailed description of the index file generated by Lucene (a perfect use of an index)
C - a list of resources relevant to Lucene development/application (again, another good use of an index)

Beware that this book is quite outdated by now: some of the APIs described in the book (e.g. "Field.Keyword") don't work anymore in recent versions of Lucene, lots of new stuff isn't covered, some information (such as that IndexWriter can't delete documents) is no longer true.

It's still useful as a "Getting Started" tutorial, because there's no such thing in Lucene's official documentation, but the price is a bit high for that.

I love the Deitel & Deitel series programming books because of their deliberate intend to teach by real-world examples. It doesn't matter if an author gives you all the techno mombo-jombo behind the software/language if they can't show you how it works in the real-world.

This is where Lucene in Action shines. Every code example is not only useful, cleanly designed, but production ready. This is how a programming book should be designed: simple and straight to the point. In the programming world, a good example is worth 1000 pages of documentation.

Wether you are beginner or advanced programmer, Lucene in Action will make you feel at home and you will not be lost by any of the code or description behind the architecture.

Having had to work with Lucene, this book offers a good overview of the technologies and also how it has been integrated into other solutions such as Nutch and so on. Lucene is used across the board and this is a book I would recommend for anyone interested in Search technologies. It's structured and informative and is a good place to cross-reference Lucene tools also. An example I found was a reference to Luke which is a third-party Lucene tool for analyzing the indexes. I looked up Lucene In Action and it was covered there in good detail along with other third-party tools.

The authors are extremely helpful and active in the lucene mailing lists/faq. It's a pleasure to have a book written by people with not only practical experience using lucene, but actually develop the code itself. This book does an excellent job of introducing lucene and providing practical applications for it. A must have for any lucene user.

I think the overall rating for this book is at 4.0, only because of some people using the older first edition and finding that it is already out of date. Also it would be nice if amazon separates product ratings from the shipping/supplier ratings, because the book's rating unfortunately suffers because of a bad shipment rating!

I was waiting eagerly for the 2nd edition and it is out now. It is written extremely well. It still has the same flow, clarity and style as the first edition. If you need to know lucene well, then the 2nd edition is a must-have! It also has lots of new chapters (like the one on tika).

Thanks to apache software foundation for their open source software development & support!

Using this book I had a finder window up and running in our Java application in a couple of hours. The book has great examples and you don't have to do a lot of reading to find out what you need to know.