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Solr 3 Enterprise Search Server book review

Posted by .: Pampa :.

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Get the book here from PacktPub.com / Written by David Smiley and Eric Pugh
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Excellent book! Pretty wide and complete information.

- Intro
The book doesn’t requires you to know about text search or Java. Actually I don’t know about them and anyway it was a natural flow while I was reading.
Beside some typos that are far from critical, all the rest I have to say is flattery.
It covers from scratch, explaining about download-and-start Solr, up to deployment, securing and performance tuning.
The whole book is full of links to the official documentation and sometimes to issues about patches and collaborations (under the Apache’s JIRA tracker system).

- Flow
It starts with the basics of setting up a Solr instance, then goes to schema design and text processing by tokenization, filtering, etc.
Then explains how to load data in different ways like XML, CSV, pulling directly from DB through DIH and more, to end up chapter 4 with how to search data through different parsers (kind of “searchers”) and even doing Geolocation search!
Next comes Search Relevancy and an explanation of the scoring calculation and guideliness on how to debug and affect them, followed by Faceting that leads to the Components chapter which explains “More Like This”, highlighting, stats, etc.
Now starts the final part which talks about implementation of Solr.
It covers logging, going public, securing, integrating with other applications in different programming languages (like JavaScript, PHP, Ruby), scaling (horizontally, vertically and sharding) and performance tuning.

- Pesonal Thoughts
Considering I had no previous experience with text search, and that I have already implemented Solr in 2 projects (one with geolocation), the book was an invaluable tool for me.
Sometimes official documentation is limited or hasn’t clear application examples and there’s when the book pays itself.
I like this kind of books that aren’t only “how to do …” but also includes experience from the author(s).

- Final Note
I had the pleasure to be one of the early reviewers of this book and I want to warmly thank David Smiley who offered me for its kindness, and make this extensible to PacktPub team.

Do I still have to say that I recommend this book?