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-server
By 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)
dsmi...@mitre.org
Eric Pugh (co-author)
ep...@opensourceconnections.com
