Solr 1.4 Enterprise Search Server [Paperback]

David Smiley (Author), Eric Pugh (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 19, 2009

The book takes a tutorial approach with fully working examples. It will show you how to implement a Solr-based search engine on your intranet or web site. This book is for developers who would like to use Solr for their applications. You only need to have basic programming skills to use Solr. Knowledge of Lucene is certainly a bonus.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

David Smiley

Born to code, David Smiley is a senior software developer with 10 years of experience in the defense industry using Java and various web technologies. David is a strong believer in the open-source development model and has made small contributions to various projects over the years.

David began using Lucene way back in 2000 and was immediately excited by it and its future potential. Later on he went to use the Lucene-based "Compass" library to construct a very basic search server similar in spirit to Solr. Since then, David has used Solr for a larger search project and was able to contribute modifications back to the Solr community. Although preferring open-source solutions, David has also been trained on the commercial Endeca search platform and is currently using that product as well as Solr for a different project.

Eric Pugh

Fascinated by the "craft" of software development, Eric Pugh has been heavily involved in the open source world as a developer, committer, and user for the past 5 years. He is a member of the Apache Software Foundation and lately has been mulling over how we move from the read/write web to the read/write/share web.

In biotech, financial services, and defense IT, he has helped European and American companies develop coherent strategies for embracing open source software. As a speaker he has advocated the advantages of Agile practices in software development.

Eric became involved in Solr when he submitted the patch SOLR-284 for Parsing Rich Document types such as PDF and MS Office formats that became the single most popular patch as measured by votes! SOLR-284 became part of Solr version 1.4.

Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Packt Publishing (August 19, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1847195881
• ISBN-13: 978-1847195883
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #451,850 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The One, The Only...but still surprsingly good, September 24, 2009

By 

Technical Reader (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Solr 1.4 Enterprise Search Server (Paperback)

A required tome for anyone working with Solr. It is recent - actually, it is ahead of the curve - covering Solr 1.4 which is not even GA from apache yet (as of September 2009).

This is the only book for Solr. Literally -- nobody else has written one yet. Despite the lack of competition, the authors have done a good job putting some useful and new information to paper.

The book covers Solr and SolrJ - the embedded Java client API - and even provides some instruction on integration/embedding into your own Java app instead of using it as a stand-alone HTTP server. This capability exists but reference code and documentation is all but nil in the official docs. Performance tuning and replication are also covered. Generally, this book gives you what you need to make use fo the key (and some sideline) features of Solr so you can get it working for you.

And a big plus: no huge appendices of Javadoc that are useful only to increase page counts to make you feel you are getting 'value'. Really, who refers to Javadoc at the back of a book? I thank the authors and publishers for avoiding this temptation.


But the book does suffer from a problem inherent in tech publications: the assumption that the reader will start on page 1 and move forward. It tries to teach by creating one monolithic application that is spread throughout 300 pages. This is annoying if you start on chapter 8 as much context is lost. Also, these types of books spend too much time focused on the example application code and not enough time talking about the book topic. In the case of this book, the authors use a music database as their example application -- and spend many, may pages talking ancillary garbage about the music metadata, objects and the applications needed to download/use it. I don't care about how to use MusicBrainz. Really.

My free advice to publishers: develop your monolithic reference applications and post them to your website. Refer to them in your books, but use the pages otherwise wasted on music metadata trivia to show two or three alternate ways of using Solr, instead of the one that fits your fictional use case.


Summary:

Solr has real potential but like most open source projects is sorely missing documentation and reference implementations. Like always, you could crawl the source to figure it out yourself ("What Would Stallman Do?") or buy this book. Frankly, my time is worth more than the book. I'd rather crawl through my own source.

While the authors get caught in the all-too-common approach of extending a single fictional use case throughout the entire book (hate that) - forcing too many pages to focus on the context of their use case and fewer pages on Solr - they do deliver enough of the goods to earn four stars. It would be five if they dropped the extraneous junk and used more pages for the core Solr product.


NB: I love Amazon but am going to point you to the publisher's website on this one. There you get the hardcopy book PLUS an immediately downloadable, password-free, copy-and-paste friendly eBook for about the cost of the paper version alone. I travel a lot and the eBook is amazingly helpful.

Amazon: add the eBook (not Kindle, I need this on my laptop).

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Good Book that Helped me go from 0 to Production, October 14, 2009

By 

Vladimir Landman "Vladimir" (Sioux City, IA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Solr 1.4 Enterprise Search Server (Paperback)

I bought this book after reading different Solr guides and tutorials. The problem with the guides and tutorials is they did not do a good enough job of explaining what the different Solr terminology was. Faceting, Multiple Cores, etc.

This book started out a bit slow, but was pretty well organized. It showed numerous ways of bringing data into Solr, and numerous ways of getting data out. The publisher lets you download the source code and data on their site, and you can stick that into Solr.

I also like the fact that the book is pretty recent. I could not find anything in the book which had become "deprecated". All in all, the book helped me go from knowing nothing about Solr, to going live in 2-3 weeks which is pretty darn good.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Shaved 2 weeks off my project, July 8, 2010

By 

D. Bruns - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Solr 1.4 Enterprise Search Server (Paperback)

Coming from a PHP Web Development background, I have had little experience using Java on web development projects. Although I am quite familiar with the language, it has been a good 6 years since I really used Java. This book was exactly what I needed to get a powerful search engine up and running for my system. I have an application with 200,000 products that must be searchable. Millions of options and billions of combinations make for a fairly complex system. Solr was the right way to go, but online documentation just didn't cut it. "Solr 1.4 Enterprise Search Server" explained everything I needed to know in a way that was not difficult to understand. Although the book was written before Solr 1.4 was released, the authors did a good job of keeping the content relevant and mention potential hiccups when 1.4 would be released. There is a decent section on implementation with PHP and Ruby.

I'm giving this book 4 stars only because I think the authors could have done a better job explaining the process and best practices for going into a production mode with Solr.

If you are looking to build a fast and accurate search engine for large amounts of data, Solr is the way to go and this book will help you.