Re: Note on The Book
It's 2013 and people suffer from ADD. Break it up into a la carte chapter books. Otis -- Solr ElasticSearch Support http://sematext.com/ On Wed, May 29, 2013 at 6:23 PM, Jack Krupansky j...@basetechnology.com wrote: Markus, Okay, more pages it is! -- Jack Krupansky -Original Message- From: Markus Jelsma Sent: Wednesday, May 29, 2013 5:35 PM To: solr-user@lucene.apache.org Subject: RE: Note on The Book Jack, I'd prefer tons of information instead of a meager 300 page book that leaves a lot of questions. I'm looking forward to a paperback or hardcover book and price doesn't really matter, it is going to be worth it anyway. Thanks, Markus -Original message- From:Jack Krupansky j...@basetechnology.com Sent: Wed 29-May-2013 15:10 To: solr-user@lucene.apache.org Subject: Re: Note on The Book Erick, your point is well taken. Although my primary interest/skill is to produce a solid foundation reference (including tons of examples), the real goal is to then build on top of that foundation. While I focus on the hard-core material - which really does include some narrative and lots of examples in addition to tons of mere reference, my co-author, Ryan Tabora, will focus almost exclusively on... narrative and diagrams. And when I say reference, I also mean lots of examples. Even as the hard-core reference stabilizes, the examples will continue to grow (like weeds!). Once we get the current, existing, under-review, chapters packaged into the new book and available for purchase and download (maybe Lulu, not decided) - available, in a couple of weeks, it will be updated approximately every other week, both with additional reference material, and additional narrative and diagrams. One of our priorities (after we get through Stage 0 of the next few weeks) is to in fact start giving each of the long Deep Dive Chapters enough narrative lead to basically say exactly that - why you should care. A longer-term priority is to improve the balance of narrative and hard-core reference. Yeah, that will be a lot of pages. It already is. We were at 907 pages and I was about to drop in another 166 pages on update handlers when O'Reilly threw up their hands and pulled the plug. I was estimating 1200 pages at that stage. And I'll probably have another 60-80 pages on update request processors within a week or so. With more to come. That did include a lot of hard-core material and example code for Lucene, which won't be in the new Solr-only book. By focusing on an e-book the raw page count alone becomes moot. We haven't given up on print - the intent is eventually to have multiple volumes (4-8 or so, maybe more), both as cheaper e-books ($3 to $5 each) and slimmer print volumes for people who don't need everything in print. In fact, we will likely offer the revamped initial chapters of the book as a standalone introduction to Solr - narrative introduction (why should you care about Solr), basic concepts of Lucene and Solr (and why you should care!), brief tutorial walkthough of the major feature areas of Solr, and a case study. The intent would be both e-book and a slim print volume (75 pages?). Another priority (beyond Stage 0) is to develop a detailed roadmap diagram of Solr and how applications can use Solr, and then use that to show how each of the Deep Dive sections (heavy reference, but gradually adding more narrative over time.) We will probably be very open to requests - what people really wish a book would actually do for them. The only request we won't be open to is to do it all in only 300 pages. -- Jack Krupansky -Original Message- From: Erick Erickson Sent: Wednesday, May 29, 2013 7:19 AM To: solr-user@lucene.apache.org Subject: Re: Note on The Book FWIW, picking up on Alexandre's point. One of my continual frustrations with virtually _all_ technical books is they become endless pages of details without ever mentioning why the hell I should care. Unfortunately, explaining use-cases for everything would only make the book about 10,000 pages long. Siiigh. I guess you can take this as a vote for narrative Erick On Tue, May 28, 2013 at 4:53 PM, Jack Krupansky j...@basetechnology.com wrote: We'll have a blog for the book. We hope to have a first raw/rough/partial/draft published as an e-book in maybe 10 days to 2 weeks. As soon as we get that process under control, we'll start the blog. I'll keep your email on file and keep you posted. -- Jack Krupansky -Original Message- From: Swati Swoboda Sent: Tuesday, May 28, 2013 1:36 PM To: solr-user@lucene.apache.org Subject: RE: Note on The Book I'd definitely prefer the spiral bound as well. E-books are great and your draft version seems very reasonably priced (aka I would definitely get it). Really looking forward to this. Is there a separate mailing list / etc. for the book for those
Re: Note on The Book
Point taken. Although initially the focus is on one big e-book - to make searching easier, with zero chance of printing that as one paper book, the intent is to go multi-volume for the print edition down the road a little bit. -- Jack Krupansky -Original Message- From: Otis Gospodnetic Sent: Sunday, June 09, 2013 2:12 AM To: solr-user@lucene.apache.org Subject: Re: Note on The Book It's 2013 and people suffer from ADD. Break it up into a la carte chapter books. Otis -- Solr ElasticSearch Support http://sematext.com/ On Wed, May 29, 2013 at 6:23 PM, Jack Krupansky j...@basetechnology.com wrote: Markus, Okay, more pages it is! -- Jack Krupansky -Original Message- From: Markus Jelsma Sent: Wednesday, May 29, 2013 5:35 PM To: solr-user@lucene.apache.org Subject: RE: Note on The Book Jack, I'd prefer tons of information instead of a meager 300 page book that leaves a lot of questions. I'm looking forward to a paperback or hardcover book and price doesn't really matter, it is going to be worth it anyway. Thanks, Markus -Original message- From:Jack Krupansky j...@basetechnology.com Sent: Wed 29-May-2013 15:10 To: solr-user@lucene.apache.org Subject: Re: Note on The Book Erick, your point is well taken. Although my primary interest/skill is to produce a solid foundation reference (including tons of examples), the real goal is to then build on top of that foundation. While I focus on the hard-core material - which really does include some narrative and lots of examples in addition to tons of mere reference, my co-author, Ryan Tabora, will focus almost exclusively on... narrative and diagrams. And when I say reference, I also mean lots of examples. Even as the hard-core reference stabilizes, the examples will continue to grow (like weeds!). Once we get the current, existing, under-review, chapters packaged into the new book and available for purchase and download (maybe Lulu, not decided) - available, in a couple of weeks, it will be updated approximately every other week, both with additional reference material, and additional narrative and diagrams. One of our priorities (after we get through Stage 0 of the next few weeks) is to in fact start giving each of the long Deep Dive Chapters enough narrative lead to basically say exactly that - why you should care. A longer-term priority is to improve the balance of narrative and hard-core reference. Yeah, that will be a lot of pages. It already is. We were at 907 pages and I was about to drop in another 166 pages on update handlers when O'Reilly threw up their hands and pulled the plug. I was estimating 1200 pages at that stage. And I'll probably have another 60-80 pages on update request processors within a week or so. With more to come. That did include a lot of hard-core material and example code for Lucene, which won't be in the new Solr-only book. By focusing on an e-book the raw page count alone becomes moot. We haven't given up on print - the intent is eventually to have multiple volumes (4-8 or so, maybe more), both as cheaper e-books ($3 to $5 each) and slimmer print volumes for people who don't need everything in print. In fact, we will likely offer the revamped initial chapters of the book as a standalone introduction to Solr - narrative introduction (why should you care about Solr), basic concepts of Lucene and Solr (and why you should care!), brief tutorial walkthough of the major feature areas of Solr, and a case study. The intent would be both e-book and a slim print volume (75 pages?). Another priority (beyond Stage 0) is to develop a detailed roadmap diagram of Solr and how applications can use Solr, and then use that to show how each of the Deep Dive sections (heavy reference, but gradually adding more narrative over time.) We will probably be very open to requests - what people really wish a book would actually do for them. The only request we won't be open to is to do it all in only 300 pages. -- Jack Krupansky -Original Message- From: Erick Erickson Sent: Wednesday, May 29, 2013 7:19 AM To: solr-user@lucene.apache.org Subject: Re: Note on The Book FWIW, picking up on Alexandre's point. One of my continual frustrations with virtually _all_ technical books is they become endless pages of details without ever mentioning why the hell I should care. Unfortunately, explaining use-cases for everything would only make the book about 10,000 pages long. Siiigh. I guess you can take this as a vote for narrative Erick On Tue, May 28, 2013 at 4:53 PM, Jack Krupansky j...@basetechnology.com wrote: We'll have a blog for the book. We hope to have a first raw/rough/partial/draft published as an e-book in maybe 10 days to 2 weeks. As soon as we get that process under control, we'll start the blog. I'll keep your email on file and keep you posted. -- Jack Krupansky -Original Message- From: Swati Swoboda Sent: Tuesday, May 28, 2013 1:36 PM
Re: Note on The Book
IMHO I prefer narrative, as Erick says, explain all use-cases it's impossible, cover the base cases is a good start. Either way I miss a book about solr different to a cookbook or a guide. Regards. -- Yago Riveiro Sent with Sparrow (http://www.sparrowmailapp.com/?sig) On Wednesday, May 29, 2013 at 12:19 PM, Erick Erickson wrote: FWIW, picking up on Alexandre's point. One of my continual frustrations with virtually _all_ technical books is they become endless pages of details without ever mentioning why the hell I should care. Unfortunately, explaining use-cases for everything would only make the book about 10,000 pages long. Siiigh. I guess you can take this as a vote for narrative Erick On Tue, May 28, 2013 at 4:53 PM, Jack Krupansky j...@basetechnology.com (mailto:j...@basetechnology.com) wrote: We'll have a blog for the book. We hope to have a first raw/rough/partial/draft published as an e-book in maybe 10 days to 2 weeks. As soon as we get that process under control, we'll start the blog. I'll keep your email on file and keep you posted. -- Jack Krupansky -Original Message- From: Swati Swoboda Sent: Tuesday, May 28, 2013 1:36 PM To: solr-user@lucene.apache.org (mailto:solr-user@lucene.apache.org) Subject: RE: Note on The Book I'd definitely prefer the spiral bound as well. E-books are great and your draft version seems very reasonably priced (aka I would definitely get it). Really looking forward to this. Is there a separate mailing list / etc. for the book for those who would like to receive updates on the status of the book? Thanks Swati Swoboda Software Developer - Igloo Software +1.519.489.4120 sswob...@igloosoftware.com (mailto:sswob...@igloosoftware.com) Bring back Cake Fridays – watch a video you’ll actually like http://vimeo.com/64886237 -Original Message- From: Jack Krupansky [mailto:j...@basetechnology.com] Sent: Thursday, May 23, 2013 7:15 PM To: solr-user@lucene.apache.org (mailto:solr-user@lucene.apache.org) Subject: Note on The Book To those of you who may have heard about the Lucene/Solr book that I and two others are writing on Lucene and Solr, some bad and good news. The bad news: The book contract with O’Reilly has been canceled. The good news: I’m going to proceed with self-publishing (possibly on Lulu or even Amazon) a somewhat reduced scope Solr-only Reference Guide (with hints of Lucene). The scope of the previous effort was too great, even for O’Reilly – a book larger than 800 pages (or even 600) that was heavy on reference and lighter on “guide” just wasn’t fitting in with their traditional “guide” model. In truth, Solr is just too complex for a simple guide that covers it all, let alone Lucene as well. I’ll announce more details in the coming weeks, but I expect to publish an e-book-only version of the book, focused on Solr reference (and plenty of guide as well), possibly on Lulu, plus eventually publish 4-8 individual print volumes for people who really want the paper. One model I may pursue is to offer the current, incomplete, raw, rough, draft as a $7.99 e-book, with the promise of updates every two weeks or a month as new and revised content and new releases of Solr become available. Maybe the individual e-book volumes would be $2 or $3. These are just preliminary ideas. Feel free to let me know what seems reasonable or excessive. For paper: Do people really want perfect bound, or would you prefer spiral bound that lies flat and folds back easily? I suppose we could offer both – which should be considered “premium”? I’ll announce more details next week. The immediate goal will be to get the “raw rough draft” available to everyone ASAP. For those of you who have been early reviewers – your effort will not have been in vain. I have all your comments and will address them over the next month or two or three. Just for some clarity, the existing Solr Wiki and even the recent contribution of the LucidWorks Solr Reference to Apache really are still great contributions to general knowledge about Solr, but the book is intended to go much deeper into detail, especially with loads of examples and a lot more narrative guide. For example, the book has a complete list of the analyzer filters, each with a clean one-liner description. Ditto for every parameter (although I would note that the LucidWorks Solr Reference does a decent job of that as well.) Maybe, eventually, everything in the book COULD (and will) be integrated into the standard Solr doc, but until then, a single, integrated reference really is sorely needed. And, the book has a lot of narrative guide and walking through examples as well. Over time, I’m sure both will evolve. And just to be clear, the book is not a simple repurposing of the Solr wiki content – EVERY
Re: Note on The Book
Perhaps, you will enjoy mine then: http://www.packtpub.com/apache-solr-for-indexing-data/book . I will send a formal announcement to the list a little later, but basically this is a book for advanced beginners and early intermediates and takes them from a basic index to multilingual indexing with bells and whistles. Covers a small part of Solr (Solr is big!), but shows how different parts work together. It's structured as a cookbook but the narrative is a journey. Regards, Alex. Personal blog: http://blog.outerthoughts.com/ LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/alexandrerafalovitch - Time is the quality of nature that keeps events from happening all at once. Lately, it doesn't seem to be working. (Anonymous - via GTD book) On Wed, May 29, 2013 at 7:33 AM, Yago Riveiro yago.rive...@gmail.com wrote: IMHO I prefer narrative, as Erick says, explain all use-cases it's impossible, cover the base cases is a good start. Either way I miss a book about solr different to a cookbook or a guide. Regards. -- Yago Riveiro Sent with Sparrow (http://www.sparrowmailapp.com/?sig) On Wednesday, May 29, 2013 at 12:19 PM, Erick Erickson wrote: FWIW, picking up on Alexandre's point. One of my continual frustrations with virtually _all_ technical books is they become endless pages of details without ever mentioning why the hell I should care. Unfortunately, explaining use-cases for everything would only make the book about 10,000 pages long. Siiigh. I guess you can take this as a vote for narrative Erick On Tue, May 28, 2013 at 4:53 PM, Jack Krupansky j...@basetechnology.com (mailto:j...@basetechnology.com) wrote: We'll have a blog for the book. We hope to have a first raw/rough/partial/draft published as an e-book in maybe 10 days to 2 weeks. As soon as we get that process under control, we'll start the blog. I'll keep your email on file and keep you posted. -- Jack Krupansky -Original Message- From: Swati Swoboda Sent: Tuesday, May 28, 2013 1:36 PM To: solr-user@lucene.apache.org (mailto:solr-user@lucene.apache.org) Subject: RE: Note on The Book I'd definitely prefer the spiral bound as well. E-books are great and your draft version seems very reasonably priced (aka I would definitely get it). Really looking forward to this. Is there a separate mailing list / etc. for the book for those who would like to receive updates on the status of the book? Thanks Swati Swoboda Software Developer - Igloo Software +1.519.489.4120 sswob...@igloosoftware.com (mailto:sswob...@igloosoftware.com) Bring back Cake Fridays – watch a video you’ll actually like http://vimeo.com/64886237 -Original Message- From: Jack Krupansky [mailto:j...@basetechnology.com] Sent: Thursday, May 23, 2013 7:15 PM To: solr-user@lucene.apache.org (mailto:solr-user@lucene.apache.org) Subject: Note on The Book To those of you who may have heard about the Lucene/Solr book that I and two others are writing on Lucene and Solr, some bad and good news. The bad news: The book contract with O’Reilly has been canceled. The good news: I’m going to proceed with self-publishing (possibly on Lulu or even Amazon) a somewhat reduced scope Solr-only Reference Guide (with hints of Lucene). The scope of the previous effort was too great, even for O’Reilly – a book larger than 800 pages (or even 600) that was heavy on reference and lighter on “guide” just wasn’t fitting in with their traditional “guide” model. In truth, Solr is just too complex for a simple guide that covers it all, let alone Lucene as well. I’ll announce more details in the coming weeks, but I expect to publish an e-book-only version of the book, focused on Solr reference (and plenty of guide as well), possibly on Lulu, plus eventually publish 4-8 individual print volumes for people who really want the paper. One model I may pursue is to offer the current, incomplete, raw, rough, draft as a $7.99 e-book, with the promise of updates every two weeks or a month as new and revised content and new releases of Solr become available. Maybe the individual e-book volumes would be $2 or $3. These are just preliminary ideas. Feel free to let me know what seems reasonable or excessive. For paper: Do people really want perfect bound, or would you prefer spiral bound that lies flat and folds back easily? I suppose we could offer both – which should be considered “premium”? I’ll announce more details next week. The immediate goal will be to get the “raw rough draft” available to everyone ASAP. For those of you who have been early reviewers – your effort will not have been in vain. I have all your comments and will address them over the next month or two or three. Just for some clarity, the existing Solr Wiki and even the recent contribution of the LucidWorks Solr Reference to Apache really are still great contributions
Re: Note on The Book
Erick, your point is well taken. Although my primary interest/skill is to produce a solid foundation reference (including tons of examples), the real goal is to then build on top of that foundation. While I focus on the hard-core material - which really does include some narrative and lots of examples in addition to tons of mere reference, my co-author, Ryan Tabora, will focus almost exclusively on... narrative and diagrams. And when I say reference, I also mean lots of examples. Even as the hard-core reference stabilizes, the examples will continue to grow (like weeds!). Once we get the current, existing, under-review, chapters packaged into the new book and available for purchase and download (maybe Lulu, not decided) - available, in a couple of weeks, it will be updated approximately every other week, both with additional reference material, and additional narrative and diagrams. One of our priorities (after we get through Stage 0 of the next few weeks) is to in fact start giving each of the long Deep Dive Chapters enough narrative lead to basically say exactly that - why you should care. A longer-term priority is to improve the balance of narrative and hard-core reference. Yeah, that will be a lot of pages. It already is. We were at 907 pages and I was about to drop in another 166 pages on update handlers when O'Reilly threw up their hands and pulled the plug. I was estimating 1200 pages at that stage. And I'll probably have another 60-80 pages on update request processors within a week or so. With more to come. That did include a lot of hard-core material and example code for Lucene, which won't be in the new Solr-only book. By focusing on an e-book the raw page count alone becomes moot. We haven't given up on print - the intent is eventually to have multiple volumes (4-8 or so, maybe more), both as cheaper e-books ($3 to $5 each) and slimmer print volumes for people who don't need everything in print. In fact, we will likely offer the revamped initial chapters of the book as a standalone introduction to Solr - narrative introduction (why should you care about Solr), basic concepts of Lucene and Solr (and why you should care!), brief tutorial walkthough of the major feature areas of Solr, and a case study. The intent would be both e-book and a slim print volume (75 pages?). Another priority (beyond Stage 0) is to develop a detailed roadmap diagram of Solr and how applications can use Solr, and then use that to show how each of the Deep Dive sections (heavy reference, but gradually adding more narrative over time.) We will probably be very open to requests - what people really wish a book would actually do for them. The only request we won't be open to is to do it all in only 300 pages. -- Jack Krupansky -Original Message- From: Erick Erickson Sent: Wednesday, May 29, 2013 7:19 AM To: solr-user@lucene.apache.org Subject: Re: Note on The Book FWIW, picking up on Alexandre's point. One of my continual frustrations with virtually _all_ technical books is they become endless pages of details without ever mentioning why the hell I should care. Unfortunately, explaining use-cases for everything would only make the book about 10,000 pages long. Siiigh. I guess you can take this as a vote for narrative Erick On Tue, May 28, 2013 at 4:53 PM, Jack Krupansky j...@basetechnology.com wrote: We'll have a blog for the book. We hope to have a first raw/rough/partial/draft published as an e-book in maybe 10 days to 2 weeks. As soon as we get that process under control, we'll start the blog. I'll keep your email on file and keep you posted. -- Jack Krupansky -Original Message- From: Swati Swoboda Sent: Tuesday, May 28, 2013 1:36 PM To: solr-user@lucene.apache.org Subject: RE: Note on The Book I'd definitely prefer the spiral bound as well. E-books are great and your draft version seems very reasonably priced (aka I would definitely get it). Really looking forward to this. Is there a separate mailing list / etc. for the book for those who would like to receive updates on the status of the book? Thanks Swati Swoboda Software Developer - Igloo Software +1.519.489.4120 sswob...@igloosoftware.com Bring back Cake Fridays – watch a video you’ll actually like http://vimeo.com/64886237 -Original Message- From: Jack Krupansky [mailto:j...@basetechnology.com] Sent: Thursday, May 23, 2013 7:15 PM To: solr-user@lucene.apache.org Subject: Note on The Book To those of you who may have heard about the Lucene/Solr book that I and two others are writing on Lucene and Solr, some bad and good news. The bad news: The book contract with O’Reilly has been canceled. The good news: I’m going to proceed with self-publishing (possibly on Lulu or even Amazon) a somewhat reduced scope Solr-only Reference Guide (with hints of Lucene). The scope of the previous effort was too great, even for O’Reilly – a book larger than 800 pages
RE: Note on The Book
Jack, I'd prefer tons of information instead of a meager 300 page book that leaves a lot of questions. I'm looking forward to a paperback or hardcover book and price doesn't really matter, it is going to be worth it anyway. Thanks, Markus -Original message- From:Jack Krupansky j...@basetechnology.com Sent: Wed 29-May-2013 15:10 To: solr-user@lucene.apache.org Subject: Re: Note on The Book Erick, your point is well taken. Although my primary interest/skill is to produce a solid foundation reference (including tons of examples), the real goal is to then build on top of that foundation. While I focus on the hard-core material - which really does include some narrative and lots of examples in addition to tons of mere reference, my co-author, Ryan Tabora, will focus almost exclusively on... narrative and diagrams. And when I say reference, I also mean lots of examples. Even as the hard-core reference stabilizes, the examples will continue to grow (like weeds!). Once we get the current, existing, under-review, chapters packaged into the new book and available for purchase and download (maybe Lulu, not decided) - available, in a couple of weeks, it will be updated approximately every other week, both with additional reference material, and additional narrative and diagrams. One of our priorities (after we get through Stage 0 of the next few weeks) is to in fact start giving each of the long Deep Dive Chapters enough narrative lead to basically say exactly that - why you should care. A longer-term priority is to improve the balance of narrative and hard-core reference. Yeah, that will be a lot of pages. It already is. We were at 907 pages and I was about to drop in another 166 pages on update handlers when O'Reilly threw up their hands and pulled the plug. I was estimating 1200 pages at that stage. And I'll probably have another 60-80 pages on update request processors within a week or so. With more to come. That did include a lot of hard-core material and example code for Lucene, which won't be in the new Solr-only book. By focusing on an e-book the raw page count alone becomes moot. We haven't given up on print - the intent is eventually to have multiple volumes (4-8 or so, maybe more), both as cheaper e-books ($3 to $5 each) and slimmer print volumes for people who don't need everything in print. In fact, we will likely offer the revamped initial chapters of the book as a standalone introduction to Solr - narrative introduction (why should you care about Solr), basic concepts of Lucene and Solr (and why you should care!), brief tutorial walkthough of the major feature areas of Solr, and a case study. The intent would be both e-book and a slim print volume (75 pages?). Another priority (beyond Stage 0) is to develop a detailed roadmap diagram of Solr and how applications can use Solr, and then use that to show how each of the Deep Dive sections (heavy reference, but gradually adding more narrative over time.) We will probably be very open to requests - what people really wish a book would actually do for them. The only request we won't be open to is to do it all in only 300 pages. -- Jack Krupansky -Original Message- From: Erick Erickson Sent: Wednesday, May 29, 2013 7:19 AM To: solr-user@lucene.apache.org Subject: Re: Note on The Book FWIW, picking up on Alexandre's point. One of my continual frustrations with virtually _all_ technical books is they become endless pages of details without ever mentioning why the hell I should care. Unfortunately, explaining use-cases for everything would only make the book about 10,000 pages long. Siiigh. I guess you can take this as a vote for narrative Erick On Tue, May 28, 2013 at 4:53 PM, Jack Krupansky j...@basetechnology.com wrote: We'll have a blog for the book. We hope to have a first raw/rough/partial/draft published as an e-book in maybe 10 days to 2 weeks. As soon as we get that process under control, we'll start the blog. I'll keep your email on file and keep you posted. -- Jack Krupansky -Original Message- From: Swati Swoboda Sent: Tuesday, May 28, 2013 1:36 PM To: solr-user@lucene.apache.org Subject: RE: Note on The Book I'd definitely prefer the spiral bound as well. E-books are great and your draft version seems very reasonably priced (aka I would definitely get it). Really looking forward to this. Is there a separate mailing list / etc. for the book for those who would like to receive updates on the status of the book? Thanks Swati Swoboda Software Developer - Igloo Software +1.519.489.4120 sswob...@igloosoftware.com Bring back Cake Fridays – watch a video you’ll actually like http://vimeo.com/64886237 -Original Message- From: Jack Krupansky [mailto:j...@basetechnology.com] Sent: Thursday, May 23, 2013 7:15 PM
Re: Note on The Book
Markus, Okay, more pages it is! -- Jack Krupansky -Original Message- From: Markus Jelsma Sent: Wednesday, May 29, 2013 5:35 PM To: solr-user@lucene.apache.org Subject: RE: Note on The Book Jack, I'd prefer tons of information instead of a meager 300 page book that leaves a lot of questions. I'm looking forward to a paperback or hardcover book and price doesn't really matter, it is going to be worth it anyway. Thanks, Markus -Original message- From:Jack Krupansky j...@basetechnology.com Sent: Wed 29-May-2013 15:10 To: solr-user@lucene.apache.org Subject: Re: Note on The Book Erick, your point is well taken. Although my primary interest/skill is to produce a solid foundation reference (including tons of examples), the real goal is to then build on top of that foundation. While I focus on the hard-core material - which really does include some narrative and lots of examples in addition to tons of mere reference, my co-author, Ryan Tabora, will focus almost exclusively on... narrative and diagrams. And when I say reference, I also mean lots of examples. Even as the hard-core reference stabilizes, the examples will continue to grow (like weeds!). Once we get the current, existing, under-review, chapters packaged into the new book and available for purchase and download (maybe Lulu, not decided) - available, in a couple of weeks, it will be updated approximately every other week, both with additional reference material, and additional narrative and diagrams. One of our priorities (after we get through Stage 0 of the next few weeks) is to in fact start giving each of the long Deep Dive Chapters enough narrative lead to basically say exactly that - why you should care. A longer-term priority is to improve the balance of narrative and hard-core reference. Yeah, that will be a lot of pages. It already is. We were at 907 pages and I was about to drop in another 166 pages on update handlers when O'Reilly threw up their hands and pulled the plug. I was estimating 1200 pages at that stage. And I'll probably have another 60-80 pages on update request processors within a week or so. With more to come. That did include a lot of hard-core material and example code for Lucene, which won't be in the new Solr-only book. By focusing on an e-book the raw page count alone becomes moot. We haven't given up on print - the intent is eventually to have multiple volumes (4-8 or so, maybe more), both as cheaper e-books ($3 to $5 each) and slimmer print volumes for people who don't need everything in print. In fact, we will likely offer the revamped initial chapters of the book as a standalone introduction to Solr - narrative introduction (why should you care about Solr), basic concepts of Lucene and Solr (and why you should care!), brief tutorial walkthough of the major feature areas of Solr, and a case study. The intent would be both e-book and a slim print volume (75 pages?). Another priority (beyond Stage 0) is to develop a detailed roadmap diagram of Solr and how applications can use Solr, and then use that to show how each of the Deep Dive sections (heavy reference, but gradually adding more narrative over time.) We will probably be very open to requests - what people really wish a book would actually do for them. The only request we won't be open to is to do it all in only 300 pages. -- Jack Krupansky -Original Message- From: Erick Erickson Sent: Wednesday, May 29, 2013 7:19 AM To: solr-user@lucene.apache.org Subject: Re: Note on The Book FWIW, picking up on Alexandre's point. One of my continual frustrations with virtually _all_ technical books is they become endless pages of details without ever mentioning why the hell I should care. Unfortunately, explaining use-cases for everything would only make the book about 10,000 pages long. Siiigh. I guess you can take this as a vote for narrative Erick On Tue, May 28, 2013 at 4:53 PM, Jack Krupansky j...@basetechnology.com wrote: We'll have a blog for the book. We hope to have a first raw/rough/partial/draft published as an e-book in maybe 10 days to 2 weeks. As soon as we get that process under control, we'll start the blog. I'll keep your email on file and keep you posted. -- Jack Krupansky -Original Message- From: Swati Swoboda Sent: Tuesday, May 28, 2013 1:36 PM To: solr-user@lucene.apache.org Subject: RE: Note on The Book I'd definitely prefer the spiral bound as well. E-books are great and your draft version seems very reasonably priced (aka I would definitely get it). Really looking forward to this. Is there a separate mailing list / etc. for the book for those who would like to receive updates on the status of the book? Thanks Swati Swoboda Software Developer - Igloo Software +1.519.489.4120 sswob...@igloosoftware.com Bring back Cake Fridays – watch a video you’ll actually like http://vimeo.com/64886237 -Original Message- From: Jack
Re: Note on The Book
Jack, It is worth considering something like https://leanpub.com/ . That way people can pre-pay for the result and enjoy (however 'draft'-y) results earlier. In terms of reference vs narrative, my strong desire would have been for the narrative part. The problem always seems to be around understanding how the pieces/flow fit together and - only then - what specific parameters have what syntax. For printed books, I'd probably go for a ring binder for basic version and maybe combined hard-cover for premium one. The premium one would be the one you get office to buy or as a present. :-) Regards, Alex. Personal blog: http://blog.outerthoughts.com/ LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/alexandrerafalovitch - Time is the quality of nature that keeps events from happening all at once. Lately, it doesn't seem to be working. (Anonymous - via GTD book) On Thu, May 23, 2013 at 7:14 PM, Jack Krupansky j...@basetechnology.com wrote: To those of you who may have heard about the Lucene/Solr book that I and two others are writing on Lucene and Solr, some bad and good news. The bad news: The book contract with O’Reilly has been canceled. The good news: I’m going to proceed with self-publishing (possibly on Lulu or even Amazon) a somewhat reduced scope Solr-only Reference Guide (with hints of Lucene). The scope of the previous effort was too great, even for O’Reilly – a book larger than 800 pages (or even 600) that was heavy on reference and lighter on “guide” just wasn’t fitting in with their traditional “guide” model. In truth, Solr is just too complex for a simple guide that covers it all, let alone Lucene as well. I’ll announce more details in the coming weeks, but I expect to publish an e-book-only version of the book, focused on Solr reference (and plenty of guide as well), possibly on Lulu, plus eventually publish 4-8 individual print volumes for people who really want the paper. One model I may pursue is to offer the current, incomplete, raw, rough, draft as a $7.99 e-book, with the promise of updates every two weeks or a month as new and revised content and new releases of Solr become available. Maybe the individual e-book volumes would be $2 or $3. These are just preliminary ideas. Feel free to let me know what seems reasonable or excessive. For paper: Do people really want perfect bound, or would you prefer spiral bound that lies flat and folds back easily? I suppose we could offer both – which should be considered “premium”? I’ll announce more details next week. The immediate goal will be to get the “raw rough draft” available to everyone ASAP. For those of you who have been early reviewers – your effort will not have been in vain. I have all your comments and will address them over the next month or two or three. Just for some clarity, the existing Solr Wiki and even the recent contribution of the LucidWorks Solr Reference to Apache really are still great contributions to general knowledge about Solr, but the book is intended to go much deeper into detail, especially with loads of examples and a lot more narrative guide. For example, the book has a complete list of the analyzer filters, each with a clean one-liner description. Ditto for every parameter (although I would note that the LucidWorks Solr Reference does a decent job of that as well.) Maybe, eventually, everything in the book COULD (and will) be integrated into the standard Solr doc, but until then, a single, integrated reference really is sorely needed. And, the book has a lot of narrative guide and walking through examples as well. Over time, I’m sure both will evolve. And just to be clear, the book is not a simple repurposing of the Solr wiki content – EVERY description of everything has been written fresh, from scratch. So, for example, analyzer filters get both short one-liner summary descriptions as well as more detailed descriptions, plus formal attribute specifications and numerous examples, including sample input and outputs (the LucidWorks Solr Reference does a better job with examples as well.) The book has been written in parallel with branch_4x and that will continue. -- Jack Krupansky
RE: Note on The Book
I'd definitely prefer the spiral bound as well. E-books are great and your draft version seems very reasonably priced (aka I would definitely get it). Really looking forward to this. Is there a separate mailing list / etc. for the book for those who would like to receive updates on the status of the book? Thanks Swati Swoboda Software Developer - Igloo Software +1.519.489.4120 sswob...@igloosoftware.com Bring back Cake Fridays – watch a video you’ll actually like http://vimeo.com/64886237 -Original Message- From: Jack Krupansky [mailto:j...@basetechnology.com] Sent: Thursday, May 23, 2013 7:15 PM To: solr-user@lucene.apache.org Subject: Note on The Book To those of you who may have heard about the Lucene/Solr book that I and two others are writing on Lucene and Solr, some bad and good news. The bad news: The book contract with O’Reilly has been canceled. The good news: I’m going to proceed with self-publishing (possibly on Lulu or even Amazon) a somewhat reduced scope Solr-only Reference Guide (with hints of Lucene). The scope of the previous effort was too great, even for O’Reilly – a book larger than 800 pages (or even 600) that was heavy on reference and lighter on “guide” just wasn’t fitting in with their traditional “guide” model. In truth, Solr is just too complex for a simple guide that covers it all, let alone Lucene as well. I’ll announce more details in the coming weeks, but I expect to publish an e-book-only version of the book, focused on Solr reference (and plenty of guide as well), possibly on Lulu, plus eventually publish 4-8 individual print volumes for people who really want the paper. One model I may pursue is to offer the current, incomplete, raw, rough, draft as a $7.99 e-book, with the promise of updates every two weeks or a month as new and revised content and new releases of Solr become available. Maybe the individual e-book volumes would be $2 or $3. These are just preliminary ideas. Feel free to let me know what seems reasonable or excessive. For paper: Do people really want perfect bound, or would you prefer spiral bound that lies flat and folds back easily? I suppose we could offer both – which should be considered “premium”? I’ll announce more details next week. The immediate goal will be to get the “raw rough draft” available to everyone ASAP. For those of you who have been early reviewers – your effort will not have been in vain. I have all your comments and will address them over the next month or two or three. Just for some clarity, the existing Solr Wiki and even the recent contribution of the LucidWorks Solr Reference to Apache really are still great contributions to general knowledge about Solr, but the book is intended to go much deeper into detail, especially with loads of examples and a lot more narrative guide. For example, the book has a complete list of the analyzer filters, each with a clean one-liner description. Ditto for every parameter (although I would note that the LucidWorks Solr Reference does a decent job of that as well.) Maybe, eventually, everything in the book COULD (and will) be integrated into the standard Solr doc, but until then, a single, integrated reference really is sorely needed. And, the book has a lot of narrative guide and walking through examples as well. Over time, I’m sure both will evolve. And just to be clear, the book is not a simple repurposing of the Solr wiki content – EVERY description of everything has been written fresh, from scratch. So, for example, analyzer filters get both short one-liner summary descriptions as well as more detailed descriptions, plus formal attribute specifications and numerous examples, including sample input and outputs (the LucidWorks Solr Reference does a better job with examples as well.) The book has been written in parallel with branch_4x and that will continue. -- Jack Krupansky
Re: Note on The Book
We'll have a blog for the book. We hope to have a first raw/rough/partial/draft published as an e-book in maybe 10 days to 2 weeks. As soon as we get that process under control, we'll start the blog. I'll keep your email on file and keep you posted. -- Jack Krupansky -Original Message- From: Swati Swoboda Sent: Tuesday, May 28, 2013 1:36 PM To: solr-user@lucene.apache.org Subject: RE: Note on The Book I'd definitely prefer the spiral bound as well. E-books are great and your draft version seems very reasonably priced (aka I would definitely get it). Really looking forward to this. Is there a separate mailing list / etc. for the book for those who would like to receive updates on the status of the book? Thanks Swati Swoboda Software Developer - Igloo Software +1.519.489.4120 sswob...@igloosoftware.com Bring back Cake Fridays – watch a video you’ll actually like http://vimeo.com/64886237 -Original Message- From: Jack Krupansky [mailto:j...@basetechnology.com] Sent: Thursday, May 23, 2013 7:15 PM To: solr-user@lucene.apache.org Subject: Note on The Book To those of you who may have heard about the Lucene/Solr book that I and two others are writing on Lucene and Solr, some bad and good news. The bad news: The book contract with O’Reilly has been canceled. The good news: I’m going to proceed with self-publishing (possibly on Lulu or even Amazon) a somewhat reduced scope Solr-only Reference Guide (with hints of Lucene). The scope of the previous effort was too great, even for O’Reilly – a book larger than 800 pages (or even 600) that was heavy on reference and lighter on “guide” just wasn’t fitting in with their traditional “guide” model. In truth, Solr is just too complex for a simple guide that covers it all, let alone Lucene as well. I’ll announce more details in the coming weeks, but I expect to publish an e-book-only version of the book, focused on Solr reference (and plenty of guide as well), possibly on Lulu, plus eventually publish 4-8 individual print volumes for people who really want the paper. One model I may pursue is to offer the current, incomplete, raw, rough, draft as a $7.99 e-book, with the promise of updates every two weeks or a month as new and revised content and new releases of Solr become available. Maybe the individual e-book volumes would be $2 or $3. These are just preliminary ideas. Feel free to let me know what seems reasonable or excessive. For paper: Do people really want perfect bound, or would you prefer spiral bound that lies flat and folds back easily? I suppose we could offer both – which should be considered “premium”? I’ll announce more details next week. The immediate goal will be to get the “raw rough draft” available to everyone ASAP. For those of you who have been early reviewers – your effort will not have been in vain. I have all your comments and will address them over the next month or two or three. Just for some clarity, the existing Solr Wiki and even the recent contribution of the LucidWorks Solr Reference to Apache really are still great contributions to general knowledge about Solr, but the book is intended to go much deeper into detail, especially with loads of examples and a lot more narrative guide. For example, the book has a complete list of the analyzer filters, each with a clean one-liner description. Ditto for every parameter (although I would note that the LucidWorks Solr Reference does a decent job of that as well.) Maybe, eventually, everything in the book COULD (and will) be integrated into the standard Solr doc, but until then, a single, integrated reference really is sorely needed. And, the book has a lot of narrative guide and walking through examples as well. Over time, I’m sure both will evolve. And just to be clear, the book is not a simple repurposing of the Solr wiki content – EVERY description of everything has been written fresh, from scratch. So, for example, analyzer filters get both short one-liner summary descriptions as well as more detailed descriptions, plus formal attribute specifications and numerous examples, including sample input and outputs (the LucidWorks Solr Reference does a better job with examples as well.) The book has been written in parallel with branch_4x and that will continue. -- Jack Krupansky
Re: Note on The Book
Hi Jack, I'd like to ask as a person who contributed a case study article about Automatically acquiring synonym knowledge from Wikipedia to the book. (13/05/24 8:14), Jack Krupansky wrote: To those of you who may have heard about the Lucene/Solr book that I and two others are writing on Lucene and Solr, some bad and good news. The bad news: The book contract with O’Reilly has been canceled. The good news: I’m going to proceed with self-publishing (possibly on Lulu or even Amazon) a somewhat reduced scope Solr-only Reference Guide (with hints of Lucene). The scope of the previous effort was too great, even for O’Reilly – a book larger than 800 pages (or even 600) that was heavy on reference and lighter on “guide” just wasn’t fitting in with their traditional “guide” model. In truth, Solr is just too complex for a simple guide that covers it all, let alone Lucene as well. Will the reduced Solr-only reference guide include my article? If not (for now I think it is not because my article is for Lucene case study, not Solr), I'd like to put it out on my blog or somewhere. BTW, those who want to know how to acquire synonym knowledge from Wikipedia, the summary is available at slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/KojiSekiguchi/wikipediasolr koji -- http://soleami.com/blog/lucene-4-is-super-convenient-for-developing-nlp-tools.html
Re: Note on The Book
If you would like to Solr-ize your contribution, that would be great. The focus of the book will be hard-core Solr. -- Jack Krupansky -Original Message- From: Koji Sekiguchi Sent: Monday, May 27, 2013 8:07 AM To: solr-user@lucene.apache.org Subject: Re: Note on The Book Hi Jack, I'd like to ask as a person who contributed a case study article about Automatically acquiring synonym knowledge from Wikipedia to the book. (13/05/24 8:14), Jack Krupansky wrote: To those of you who may have heard about the Lucene/Solr book that I and two others are writing on Lucene and Solr, some bad and good news. The bad news: The book contract with O’Reilly has been canceled. The good news: I’m going to proceed with self-publishing (possibly on Lulu or even Amazon) a somewhat reduced scope Solr-only Reference Guide (with hints of Lucene). The scope of the previous effort was too great, even for O’Reilly – a book larger than 800 pages (or even 600) that was heavy on reference and lighter on “guide” just wasn’t fitting in with their traditional “guide” model. In truth, Solr is just too complex for a simple guide that covers it all, let alone Lucene as well. Will the reduced Solr-only reference guide include my article? If not (for now I think it is not because my article is for Lucene case study, not Solr), I'd like to put it out on my blog or somewhere. BTW, those who want to know how to acquire synonym knowledge from Wikipedia, the summary is available at slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/KojiSekiguchi/wikipediasolr koji -- http://soleami.com/blog/lucene-4-is-super-convenient-for-developing-nlp-tools.html
Re: Note on The Book
Now my contribution can be read on soleami blog in English: Automatically Acquiring Synonym Knowledge from Wikipedia http://soleami.com/blog/automatically-acquiring-synonym-knowledge-from-wikipedia.html koji (13/05/27 21:16), Jack Krupansky wrote: If you would like to Solr-ize your contribution, that would be great. The focus of the book will be hard-core Solr. -- Jack Krupansky -Original Message- From: Koji Sekiguchi Sent: Monday, May 27, 2013 8:07 AM To: solr-user@lucene.apache.org Subject: Re: Note on The Book Hi Jack, I'd like to ask as a person who contributed a case study article about Automatically acquiring synonym knowledge from Wikipedia to the book. (13/05/24 8:14), Jack Krupansky wrote: To those of you who may have heard about the Lucene/Solr book that I and two others are writing on Lucene and Solr, some bad and good news. The bad news: The book contract with O’Reilly has been canceled. The good news: I’m going to proceed with self-publishing (possibly on Lulu or even Amazon) a somewhat reduced scope Solr-only Reference Guide (with hints of Lucene). The scope of the previous effort was too great, even for O’Reilly – a book larger than 800 pages (or even 600) that was heavy on reference and lighter on “guide” just wasn’t fitting in with their traditional “guide” model. In truth, Solr is just too complex for a simple guide that covers it all, let alone Lucene as well. Will the reduced Solr-only reference guide include my article? If not (for now I think it is not because my article is for Lucene case study, not Solr), I'd like to put it out on my blog or somewhere. BTW, those who want to know how to acquire synonym knowledge from Wikipedia, the summary is available at slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/KojiSekiguchi/wikipediasolr koji -- http://soleami.com/blog/lucene-4-is-super-convenient-for-developing-nlp-tools.html
Re: Note on The Book
Jack: Kudos for carrying on! Having a contract canceled after putting a lot of work into it must be a bummer... Personally I'm not buying many paper books any more, so the e-book version is preferable for me, so take this with a grain of salt.. but make the paper version spiral bound, _please_. I wish every reference book or cookbook or whatever, really anything I have to look at when my fingers are busy doing something else was spiral bound Best Erick On Thu, May 23, 2013 at 7:14 PM, Jack Krupansky j...@basetechnology.com wrote: To those of you who may have heard about the Lucene/Solr book that I and two others are writing on Lucene and Solr, some bad and good news. The bad news: The book contract with O’Reilly has been canceled. The good news: I’m going to proceed with self-publishing (possibly on Lulu or even Amazon) a somewhat reduced scope Solr-only Reference Guide (with hints of Lucene). The scope of the previous effort was too great, even for O’Reilly – a book larger than 800 pages (or even 600) that was heavy on reference and lighter on “guide” just wasn’t fitting in with their traditional “guide” model. In truth, Solr is just too complex for a simple guide that covers it all, let alone Lucene as well. I’ll announce more details in the coming weeks, but I expect to publish an e-book-only version of the book, focused on Solr reference (and plenty of guide as well), possibly on Lulu, plus eventually publish 4-8 individual print volumes for people who really want the paper. One model I may pursue is to offer the current, incomplete, raw, rough, draft as a $7.99 e-book, with the promise of updates every two weeks or a month as new and revised content and new releases of Solr become available. Maybe the individual e-book volumes would be $2 or $3. These are just preliminary ideas. Feel free to let me know what seems reasonable or excessive. For paper: Do people really want perfect bound, or would you prefer spiral bound that lies flat and folds back easily? I suppose we could offer both – which should be considered “premium”? I’ll announce more details next week. The immediate goal will be to get the “raw rough draft” available to everyone ASAP. For those of you who have been early reviewers – your effort will not have been in vain. I have all your comments and will address them over the next month or two or three. Just for some clarity, the existing Solr Wiki and even the recent contribution of the LucidWorks Solr Reference to Apache really are still great contributions to general knowledge about Solr, but the book is intended to go much deeper into detail, especially with loads of examples and a lot more narrative guide. For example, the book has a complete list of the analyzer filters, each with a clean one-liner description. Ditto for every parameter (although I would note that the LucidWorks Solr Reference does a decent job of that as well.) Maybe, eventually, everything in the book COULD (and will) be integrated into the standard Solr doc, but until then, a single, integrated reference really is sorely needed. And, the book has a lot of narrative guide and walking through examples as well. Over time, I’m sure both will evolve. And just to be clear, the book is not a simple repurposing of the Solr wiki content – EVERY description of everything has been written fresh, from scratch. So, for example, analyzer filters get both short one-liner summary descriptions as well as more detailed descriptions, plus formal attribute specifications and numerous examples, including sample input and outputs (the LucidWorks Solr Reference does a better job with examples as well.) The book has been written in parallel with branch_4x and that will continue. -- Jack Krupansky
Re: Note on The Book
Thanks, Erick. I could do the experiment of publishing both spiral and perfect found and see which wins. Spiral does have the one downside of not standing out on a shelf. But, for now, I'll focus on getting the (rough draft) e-book available ASAP. -- Jack Krupansky -Original Message- From: Erick Erickson Sent: Sunday, May 26, 2013 11:08 AM To: solr-user@lucene.apache.org Subject: Re: Note on The Book Jack: Kudos for carrying on! Having a contract canceled after putting a lot of work into it must be a bummer... Personally I'm not buying many paper books any more, so the e-book version is preferable for me, so take this with a grain of salt.. but make the paper version spiral bound, _please_. I wish every reference book or cookbook or whatever, really anything I have to look at when my fingers are busy doing something else was spiral bound Best Erick On Thu, May 23, 2013 at 7:14 PM, Jack Krupansky j...@basetechnology.com wrote: To those of you who may have heard about the Lucene/Solr book that I and two others are writing on Lucene and Solr, some bad and good news. The bad news: The book contract with O’Reilly has been canceled. The good news: I’m going to proceed with self-publishing (possibly on Lulu or even Amazon) a somewhat reduced scope Solr-only Reference Guide (with hints of Lucene). The scope of the previous effort was too great, even for O’Reilly – a book larger than 800 pages (or even 600) that was heavy on reference and lighter on “guide” just wasn’t fitting in with their traditional “guide” model. In truth, Solr is just too complex for a simple guide that covers it all, let alone Lucene as well. I’ll announce more details in the coming weeks, but I expect to publish an e-book-only version of the book, focused on Solr reference (and plenty of guide as well), possibly on Lulu, plus eventually publish 4-8 individual print volumes for people who really want the paper. One model I may pursue is to offer the current, incomplete, raw, rough, draft as a $7.99 e-book, with the promise of updates every two weeks or a month as new and revised content and new releases of Solr become available. Maybe the individual e-book volumes would be $2 or $3. These are just preliminary ideas. Feel free to let me know what seems reasonable or excessive. For paper: Do people really want perfect bound, or would you prefer spiral bound that lies flat and folds back easily? I suppose we could offer both – which should be considered “premium”? I’ll announce more details next week. The immediate goal will be to get the “raw rough draft” available to everyone ASAP. For those of you who have been early reviewers – your effort will not have been in vain. I have all your comments and will address them over the next month or two or three. Just for some clarity, the existing Solr Wiki and even the recent contribution of the LucidWorks Solr Reference to Apache really are still great contributions to general knowledge about Solr, but the book is intended to go much deeper into detail, especially with loads of examples and a lot more narrative guide. For example, the book has a complete list of the analyzer filters, each with a clean one-liner description. Ditto for every parameter (although I would note that the LucidWorks Solr Reference does a decent job of that as well.) Maybe, eventually, everything in the book COULD (and will) be integrated into the standard Solr doc, but until then, a single, integrated reference really is sorely needed. And, the book has a lot of narrative guide and walking through examples as well. Over time, I’m sure both will evolve. And just to be clear, the book is not a simple repurposing of the Solr wiki content – EVERY description of everything has been written fresh, from scratch. So, for example, analyzer filters get both short one-liner summary descriptions as well as more detailed descriptions, plus formal attribute specifications and numerous examples, including sample input and outputs (the LucidWorks Solr Reference does a better job with examples as well.) The book has been written in parallel with branch_4x and that will continue. -- Jack Krupansky
Note on The Book
To those of you who may have heard about the Lucene/Solr book that I and two others are writing on Lucene and Solr, some bad and good news. The bad news: The book contract with O’Reilly has been canceled. The good news: I’m going to proceed with self-publishing (possibly on Lulu or even Amazon) a somewhat reduced scope Solr-only Reference Guide (with hints of Lucene). The scope of the previous effort was too great, even for O’Reilly – a book larger than 800 pages (or even 600) that was heavy on reference and lighter on “guide” just wasn’t fitting in with their traditional “guide” model. In truth, Solr is just too complex for a simple guide that covers it all, let alone Lucene as well. I’ll announce more details in the coming weeks, but I expect to publish an e-book-only version of the book, focused on Solr reference (and plenty of guide as well), possibly on Lulu, plus eventually publish 4-8 individual print volumes for people who really want the paper. One model I may pursue is to offer the current, incomplete, raw, rough, draft as a $7.99 e-book, with the promise of updates every two weeks or a month as new and revised content and new releases of Solr become available. Maybe the individual e-book volumes would be $2 or $3. These are just preliminary ideas. Feel free to let me know what seems reasonable or excessive. For paper: Do people really want perfect bound, or would you prefer spiral bound that lies flat and folds back easily? I suppose we could offer both – which should be considered “premium”? I’ll announce more details next week. The immediate goal will be to get the “raw rough draft” available to everyone ASAP. For those of you who have been early reviewers – your effort will not have been in vain. I have all your comments and will address them over the next month or two or three. Just for some clarity, the existing Solr Wiki and even the recent contribution of the LucidWorks Solr Reference to Apache really are still great contributions to general knowledge about Solr, but the book is intended to go much deeper into detail, especially with loads of examples and a lot more narrative guide. For example, the book has a complete list of the analyzer filters, each with a clean one-liner description. Ditto for every parameter (although I would note that the LucidWorks Solr Reference does a decent job of that as well.) Maybe, eventually, everything in the book COULD (and will) be integrated into the standard Solr doc, but until then, a single, integrated reference really is sorely needed. And, the book has a lot of narrative guide and walking through examples as well. Over time, I’m sure both will evolve. And just to be clear, the book is not a simple repurposing of the Solr wiki content – EVERY description of everything has been written fresh, from scratch. So, for example, analyzer filters get both short one-liner summary descriptions as well as more detailed descriptions, plus formal attribute specifications and numerous examples, including sample input and outputs (the LucidWorks Solr Reference does a better job with examples as well.) The book has been written in parallel with branch_4x and that will continue. -- Jack Krupansky
