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Solr 1.4 Enterprise Search Server Book is Released!

Solr 1.4 Enterprise Search Server Book Cover

I am very proud to announce 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, Ive 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-server

By the way, we realize Solr 1.4 isnt out [quite] yet. It is feature-frozen however, and theres little in the forthcoming release that isnt 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 Solrs 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, well demonstrate working examples of integrating a variety of technologies with Solr such as Java, JavaScript, Drupal, Ruby, XSLT, PHP, and Python. Finally, well 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, heres hoping its a great success!