Review of “Solr 1.4 – Enterprise Search Server” – Part 1
Having been on a few trips requiring air travel lately, I finally got a chance to dig into my copy of Solr 1.4 Enterprise Search Server
by David Smiley and Eric Pugh and published by Packt Publishing. So far, I’ve made it through chapter 4 and skimmed the rest of the book.
Solr 1.4 Book Cover
First off, kudos to David and Eric, both long time contributors to Apache Solr. Producing a book that is both timely and thorough on open source software is no small task (believe me, I know) due to constant improvements, bug fixes, etc. in the code. Overall, the book is quite good and should be really useful for people starting out with Solr or for those looking to brush up on their Solr knowledge. I especially like the concreteness of the Music Brainz examples and think they do a nice job of demonstrating the concepts being discussed. For those coming from Lucene-land, the book should be very familiar and easily accessible, especially when partnered with the excellent Lucene In Action (2nd Edition).
For the most part, the information is accurate in the book, but of course, since 1.4 has not been officially released, there will no doubt be some minor changes, especially to some of the public APIs. Make sure you check the Solr Wiki and the official release for the final say.
Other than that, the book is a good read and contains a lot of useful information. I probably could have lived with out some of the random asides like the one on page 22 stating “Perhaps this will be fixed at some point” (after all, it’s open source and the authors know their way around the code, just open an issue and produce a patch!) and at the start of Chapter 5 (it’s called a Function Query because it’s a Query that executes a Function, e.g. log or sum or div,on the field and returns a score.) Even with those asides aside, the book sets the bar for future manuscripts on Apache Solr.
I will post more as I work my way through the rest of it. In the end, based on what I’ve read so far, I recommend “Solr 1.4 – Enterprise Search Server” for anyone wanting to be more familiar with Apache Solr.
Thanks for the recommendation Grant. Yes, it was a ton of work.
Such asides you pointed out are there to advise/warn the reader on things that may not be clear or I thought were strange or perhaps some nitpick that will probably be fixed at some point. I don’t think I should withold any of those views, nor should you take it as a slight (being a committer). Of course Solr will improve and the reader may choose to not/care or not agree (e.g. “Function Query” wording).
~ David
No slight taken, just saying I could have lived without them as I didn’t think they added to the rest of the book! Like I said, though, the book is excellent and worth the money.
Thank you for your review. Finally, a nice book on the search topic is published. I have been keeping an eye on search application books for a long time. I even made a list of all search application books. I hope the list grow longer and longer.