Solr 1.4 Enterprise Search Server Book is Released!
I am very proud to annouce the first book on Solr has been published by Packt. This has been a labor of love for myself and my co-author David Smiley, and we are excited to see the book now “in the wild!”. Below is a copy of the email sent to the Solr community:
Fellow Solr users,
I’ve finally finished the book “Solr 1.4 Enterprise Search Server” with my co-author Eric. We are proud to present the first book on Solr and hope you find it a valuable resource. You can find full details about the book and purchase it here:
http://www.packtpub.com/solr-1-4-enterprise-search-server/book
It can be pre-ordered at a discount now and should be shipping within a week or two. The book is also available through Amazon. You can feel good about the purchase knowing that 5% of each sale goes to support the Apache Software Foundation. For a free sample, there is a portion of chapter 5 covering faceting available as an article online here:
http://www.packtpub.com/article/faceting-in-solr-1.4-enterprise-search-serverBy the way, we realize Solr 1.4 isn’t out [quite] yet. It is feature-frozen however, and there’s little in the forthcoming release that isn’t covered in our book. About the only notable thing that comes to mind is the contrib module on search result clustering. However Eric plans to write a free online article available from Packt Publishing on that very subject.
“Solr 1.4 Enterprise Search Server” In Detail:
If you are a developer building a high-traffic web site, you need to have a terrific search engine. Sites like Netflix.com and Zappos.com employ Solr, an open source enterprise search server, which uses and extends the Lucene search library. This is the first book in the market on Solr and it will show you how to optimize your web site for high volume web traffic with full-text search capabilities along with loads of customization options. So, let your users gain a terrific search experience
This book is a comprehensive reference guide for every feature Solr has to offer. It serves the reader right from initiation to development to deployment. It also comes with complete running examples to demonstrate its use and show how to integrate it with other languages and frameworks
This book first gives you a quick overview of Solr, and then gradually takes you from basic to advanced features that enhance your search. It starts off by discussing Solr and helping you understand how it fits into your architecture—where all databases and document/web crawlers fall short, and Solr shines. The main part of the book is a thorough exploration of nearly every feature that Solr offers. To keep this interesting and realistic, we use a large open source set of metadata about artists, releases, and tracks courtesy of the MusicBrainz.org project. Using this data as a testing ground for Solr, you will learn how to import this data in various ways from CSV to XML to database access. You will then learn how to search this data in a myriad of ways, including Solr’s rich query syntax, “boosting” match scores based on record data and other means, about searching across multiple fields with different boosts, getting facets on the results, auto-complete user queries, spell-correcting searches, highlighting queried text in search results, and so on.
After this thorough tour, we’ll demonstrate working examples of integrating a variety of technologies with Solr such as Java, JavaScript, Drupal, Ruby, XSLT, PHP, and Python.
Finally, we’ll cover various deployment considerations to include indexing strategies and performance-oriented configuration that will enable you to scale Solr to meet the needs of a high-volume site
Sincerely,
David Smiley (primary-author)
dsmiley@mitre.org
Eric Pugh (co-author)
epugh@opensourceconnections.com
A huge round of thanks goes to David for bringing me into this project and being such a great partner on it! With 5% of the proceeds going to the Apache Software Foundation, here’s hoping it’s a great success!
Tags: solr
December 17th, 2007 at 6:17 pm
You should seriously give PowerShell first class treatment here…it’ll be the only game in town before long. Also, check out the similar project Console2 (http://sourceforge.net/projects/console/), it’s very similar to your goals. Not sure what lang they use.
If you make it do PowerShell, I will send you testers.
December 18th, 2007 at 3:51 am
I’d second that — build a great Powershell GUI. That’s one area where PowerShell is still sort of lacking, although there are a couple clients and the latest version of Powershell has a pretty nifty runner and shell environment.
December 18th, 2007 at 4:12 pm
Hal,
They use c++ with a visual solution of 2003 (.net 1.1). I was searching for one, and a co-worker, Jim, pointed that one out. I think c# (3.0) using .net 3.5, wpf. linq is the way to go because you can easily do things a normal command prompt cannot.
As for powershell, I agree with you both, I do plan to implement it as well as cygwin (e-texteditor currently forces you to use cygwin, so there is value there as well), but how many features, I’m not sure yet. I’m open for ideas as well as other developers hoping on board to put this together, esp people wanting to put rails like mvcp (model view controller presenter) smart client application.
Sooner or later I want to be able to have a small stack of tools including a code generation tool using code dom, etc.
January 2nd, 2008 at 9:17 am
Definitely a good idea. I vote for Cygwin and Powershell. Cygwin is a must for lots of things, including doing Rails deployments.
January 7th, 2008 at 8:51 am
Skinning and opacity? …that’s definitely gold-plating before tab-completion is even done
August 26th, 2009 at 9:13 am
Can I buy this book online as an eBook?
I am currently at India and this book is not available it seems.
Thanks and regards
Rajan Chandi
September 1st, 2009 at 9:07 am
Rajan, the book is available as a PDF: http://www.packtpub.com/solr-1-4-enterprise-search-server. You can also order a bundle of both PDF for use “right now” as well as mail you the paper copy. Let me know how you like it!
December 11th, 2009 at 2:16 pm
[...] a data aggregation service to appear from the publication of previously unpublished information. Solr would be a great engine for finding information across agencies, and performing analytics against [...]
June 22nd, 2010 at 5:29 am
Wow! You sure have put lots of effort into this site.