Open Source Documentation and Lucene
Tom Emerson has blogged about one of the things on the Lucene mailing list that has bothered me from time to time (although the problem is not solely Lucene’s): namely, the referral of questions on the User mailing lists to buy a book in order to figure out how something works. While Lucene In Action
As for Tom’s other assertion, that documentation is lacking in Lucene, I think the standard Open Source mantra is applicable here. Lucene, like most open source programs, is always willing to accept patches, especially for documentation. Furthermore, there are many excellent tutorials, powerpoints, examples available for the basics of Lucene, many of which are avaible via the Lucene Wiki.
There are a number of articles about Lucene out there, a fairly extensive Wiki and a pretty slim Javadoc. We’re always looking for contributors. Javadoc patches are VERY welcome in my eyes.
I totally agree. I think the documentation in Lucene is pretty good. The Javadocs could be better, but they require some real in-depth knowledge of search to do so it is difficult to write good docs for it.