Apache Solr 3.1 Cookbook

by Rafał Kuć

Apache Solr 3.1 Cookbook

Genres: Technology

300 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 22, 2011

Reviews

[André Hagenbruch · Rating 1 out of 5]

While Packt Publishing offers a wide range of interesting titles their books are notorious (at least in my experience) for bad editing and proof reading. And, unfortunately, this also applies to this book: one easy to catch mistake would have been the frequent ommission of determiners before nouns (which tends to be common among Polish authors writing in English); but there are also other typographic and stylistic problems that spoiled my reading experience. Just two examples: 'There are a few things worth nothing when talking about copying contents of the field to another field.' (p. 70), 'Both handlers that start during the startup of Solr are defined as the lazy ones.' (p. 100) What I found even more distracting was the amount of boilerplate text and the use of copy and paste! Due to the structure of the recipes with its sub-headings the author has to insert some more or less dummy text to keep to the convention of not putting two headings after one another which really gets on your nerves after a while if you read the book front to back. You will also find that the author copied some paragraphs almost verbatim from one recipe to another. Moreover, one could question the decisions the author made on arranging the recipes. For example, in chapter 4 we have some recipes that deal with replication and only in the third of them the author thinks that '[m]aybe it is time for some insights on how the replication works.' (p. 109)
As for the content itself, I expect a cookbook at least to go beyond the documentation and present real world use cases in a way that also covers some common pitfalls. But unfortunately this mostly isn't the case, but it often even falls behind the documentation as for instance the recipe on using synonyms doesn't even mention the problems that can arise from using multi term synonyms let alone offer solutions to overcome these. I even found one recipe ('Positioning documents with words closer to each other first') in which the sorting of the sample result set not only does not reflect what's written in the text, but also the ranking scores do not support the author's claim that '[w]e received the documents in the way we wanted.' (p. 137)
To sum this up, the book covers a lot of the relevant topics, but lacks in depth in discussing them. In my opinion you're better off reading the documentation, the mailing list and other stuff you find on the web than investing time and money in this title...

[Glenn · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is in what is called cookbook format. Advise is organised into a set of problems and how to solve each problem. This is a great book for getting started with Solr. My own needs included how to use Solr at very large scale in which this book's advise didn't always apply. For example, the data import handler is not really appropriate for big data. The chapter on improving performance was the most relevant for me.