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.
Solr 1.4 Enterprise Search Server
and over one million other books are available for Amazon Kindle. Learn more
| |||||||||||||||
New! Introducing the tech.book(store), a hub for Software Developers and Architects, Networking Administrators, TPMs, and other technology professionals to find highly-rated and highly-relevant career resources. Shop books on programming and big data, or read this week's blog posts by authors and thought-leaders in the tech industry. > Shop now |
Book Description
Frequently Bought Together
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
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images? |
More About the Authors
Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.
Customer Reviews
Share your thoughts with other customers
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
21 of 21 people found the following review helpful
Format: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).
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
By D. Bruns
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
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 deploying solr to production.
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.
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 deploying solr to production.
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.
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
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.
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.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
1.0 out of 5 stars
Just badly written
I assume because they came out with one of the first books on SOLR that people would just buy it no matter what they put inside of it. Read more
Published 2 months ago by Trevor Huckstep
3.0 out of 5 stars
Older reference, but it is ok
It is a older reference, but it is ok as a introduction.
I'd like to get a book with newer version of Solr
I'd like to get a book with newer version of Solr
Published 3 months ago by Jonathan
3.0 out of 5 stars
Should have been better
This book has a lot of information, some of it good. But man the expectations they have of the reader! Read more
Published 22 months ago by Reader
2.0 out of 5 stars
make simple things complicated
I don't know how should I put it after trying multiple times to dig into the book - in the end, my feeling is that the author really has a way to make simple things really... Read more
Published 23 months ago by Rer
1.0 out of 5 stars
Incoherent
The book is not organized for somebody who is new to this space. The english sometimes is mangled and incoherent. Read more
Published on January 3, 2011 by arief bawan
3.0 out of 5 stars
Sparse reference
This book is more a reference than a "how to" book. The examples are disorganized and buggy.
Published on July 23, 2010 by Luke H. Crouch
4.0 out of 5 stars
Necessary book to start fully using the software
The book is "quick" to read and explore all the need the reader can have to operate a fullu functional installation of the software. Read more
Published on March 7, 2010 by G. I. Stefano
4.0 out of 5 stars
Getting started wtih Solr - this book's for you!
I give this book a thumbs-up. If you're new to Solr, it's a must-have. If you're in production with Solr, you'll still likely glean some useful tips and tricks. Read more
Published on January 11, 2010 by Erik Hatcher
