Customer Reviews

Solr 1.4 Enterprise Search Server

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

 

 

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).

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.

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.

This book has a lot of information, some of it good. But man the expectations they have of the reader! First, if you want to follow along with the example data, you'd better be pretty experienced with Java. And Ant. (I am, but I'm trying to learn Solr, not work with Java or Ant.) Second, to get the data, you have to go to their site, which I did, and tried to register my email address. I never got a notifying email. So I emailed the publisher and a nice person helped me get the data. But then I found out that this "data" was some config files, and an Ant script that you have to run, which will download the actual data files via FTP, decompress them, and index them.

The Ant script blew up. It turns out that you also need to set up and run the instance of Solr first. And to do that, you have to run a multi-core instance of Solr. Don't know what that is? Go ahead and read the book first, and then you'll know, at which point you can go back to just trying to set up the stuff you need to follow along with the book. The java command they specify to run a multi-core Solr instance is about a mile long. They provide some notes about each option, but what good are notes there? If you don't already know a lot about the options used to start Java, you won't know what it's doing, and if anything goes wrong, you're stuck.

The note on all of this also says that if you have memory problems, you can refer to chapter 9, the very last chapter in the book, for help.

So to get started with this book you need to read and understand it first.

There's another point where the author goes off on a tangent about remote streaming, starts to explain a topic, then says, "I won't go any further into that. If you already know about this, you're good. If you don't, you can go learn about it." That's perfect: get me started then drop the subject and shift gears.

Plus too much of the text is unclear and ambiguous, because the authors use poor and misleading syntax. There was no professional editing of the copy. There were several passages I had to read repeatedly and ponder, before I understood, and it was not because the concept was difficult. It was because a simple idea was clouded by confusing syntax that is reminiscent of spoken speech.

There is much to learn here but there are sizable roadblocks placed in your way. The data set is large and complex, so it serves to illustrate many concepts, but it's way too much work to get it set up. They should have gone with a single data file, which you could then download directly and feed to Solr with the java post.jar file. Demonstrating multi-core could have been done with a couple other files, if you wanted to dig into it. As it is, you jump through all of the hoops, from the start, or you have nothing.

I've finally decided that I don't want to play along with their examples; they have me convinced that every time I jump through a hoop, I will discover another, and then another. So the book's usefulness to me has now dropped considerably.

If there were any other books available, I'd probably recommend not buying this book. If you need to get started with Solr, this is your only option except for a brand new "cookbook" from the same publisher that isn't even available yet.

The book is not organized for somebody who is new to this space. The english sometimes is mangled and incoherent. The chapters aren't organized to take the reader gradually into the advanced aspects of the technology. I would rather suggest the WIKI site, which has much better information.

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 complicated.

The book throws both concepts and terminology around without giving much introductory context, and trying to be philosophical about it - too me, this is a really bad writing style.

It is one of only a handful books on Solr, really disappointed.

The book is "quick" to read and explore all the need the reader can have to operate a fullu functional installation of the software. Maybe a cd or sample to download could complete better the good work done by the author. A must have in the office.

This book is more a reference than a "how to" book. The examples are disorganized and buggy.

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. I blogged an extensive review here: [...].