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Apache Solr Beginner's Guide
In DetailWith over 40 billion web pages, the importance of optimizing a search engine's performance is essential.
Solr is an open source enterprise search platform from the Apache Lucene project. Full-text search, faceted search, hit highlighting, dynamic clustering, database integration, and rich document handling are just some of its many features. Solr is highly scalable thanks to its distributed search and index replication.
Solr is written in Java and runs as a standalone full-text search server within a servlet container such as Apache Tomcat or Jetty. Solr uses the Lucene Java search library at its core for full-text indexing and search, and has REST-like HTTP/XML and JSON APIs that make it usable with most popular programming languages. Solr's powerful external configuration allows it to be tailored to many types of application without Java coding, and it has a plugin architecture to support more advanced customization.
With "Apache Solr Beginner's Guide" you will learn how to configure your own search engine experience. Using real data as an example, you will have the chance to start writing step-by-step, simple, real-world configurations and understand when and where to adopt this technology.
"Apache Solr Beginner's Guide" will start by letting you explore a simple search over real data. You will then go through a step-by-step description that gives you the chance to explore several practical features. At the end of the book you will see how Solr is used in different real-world contexts.
Using data from public domains like DBpedia, you will define several different configurations, exploring some of the most interesting Solr features, such as faceted search and navigation, auto-suggestion, and rich document indexing. You will see how to configure different analysers for handling different data types, without programming.
You will learn the basics of Solr, focusing on real-world examples and practical configurations.
ApproachWritten in a friendly, example-driven format, the book includes plenty of step-by-step instructions and examples that are designed to help you get started with Apache Solr.
This book is an entry level text into the wonderful world of Apache Solr. The book will center around a couple of simple projects such as setting up Solr and all the stuff that comes with customizing the Solr schema and configuration. This book is for developers looking to start using Apache Solr who are stuck or intimidated by the difficulty of setting it up and using it.
For anyone wanting to embed a search engine in their site to help users navigate around the mammoth data available this book is an ideal starting point. Moreover, if you are a data architect or a project manager and want to make some key design decisions, you will find that every example included in the book contains ideas usable in real-world contexts.
Solr is an open source enterprise search platform from the Apache Lucene project. Full-text search, faceted search, hit highlighting, dynamic clustering, database integration, and rich document handling are just some of its many features. Solr is highly scalable thanks to its distributed search and index replication.
Solr is written in Java and runs as a standalone full-text search server within a servlet container such as Apache Tomcat or Jetty. Solr uses the Lucene Java search library at its core for full-text indexing and search, and has REST-like HTTP/XML and JSON APIs that make it usable with most popular programming languages. Solr's powerful external configuration allows it to be tailored to many types of application without Java coding, and it has a plugin architecture to support more advanced customization.
With "Apache Solr Beginner's Guide" you will learn how to configure your own search engine experience. Using real data as an example, you will have the chance to start writing step-by-step, simple, real-world configurations and understand when and where to adopt this technology.
"Apache Solr Beginner's Guide" will start by letting you explore a simple search over real data. You will then go through a step-by-step description that gives you the chance to explore several practical features. At the end of the book you will see how Solr is used in different real-world contexts.
Using data from public domains like DBpedia, you will define several different configurations, exploring some of the most interesting Solr features, such as faceted search and navigation, auto-suggestion, and rich document indexing. You will see how to configure different analysers for handling different data types, without programming.
You will learn the basics of Solr, focusing on real-world examples and practical configurations.
ApproachWritten in a friendly, example-driven format, the book includes plenty of step-by-step instructions and examples that are designed to help you get started with Apache Solr.
This book is an entry level text into the wonderful world of Apache Solr. The book will center around a couple of simple projects such as setting up Solr and all the stuff that comes with customizing the Solr schema and configuration. This book is for developers looking to start using Apache Solr who are stuck or intimidated by the difficulty of setting it up and using it.
For anyone wanting to embed a search engine in their site to help users navigate around the mammoth data available this book is an ideal starting point. Moreover, if you are a data architect or a project manager and want to make some key design decisions, you will find that every example included in the book contains ideas usable in real-world contexts.
- GenresProgramming
326 pages, Kindle Edition
First published December 26, 2013
5 people are currently reading
21 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
March 18, 2014
Don’t let the title “beginner’s guide” mislead you. This 300-page book is an encyclopedia of recipes for running a Solr server. The introductory comment “Less theory, more results” certainly applies to this book. Serafini starts out with a quick introduction and history of Solr. Soon afterwards he has the reader up and running on a local installation of Solr. The downloadable code includes many examples and add-ons useful in following along with the text.
The author takes the reader from the basic configuration with queries using the browser alongside cURL in Terminal. We are shown examples of searching a public art database as well as PDF text searching. We are introduced to building indexes, core types, and schema.xml files, followed by spatial and faceted searches and concepts in analyzing different strategies for constructing the right searches. Time is spent explaining how to maintain our indexes and shaping our user search experience for best results.
As the book goes into more advanced topics, the author covers moving from a single core to a multi-core and finally to distributed searches. There is a chapter on writing Solr plugins to further extend the application. The final chapter covers integrating Solr search into one’s web application and touches on using the most popular languages including PHP, Ruby, Python and others.
Each chapter is broken down into short explanations and examples, followed by a “Time For Action” section and then a “What Just Happened” section. This makes it very easy to focus in on one example at a time, testing it out while reading. Each chapter concludes with a quiz to further make sure the reader is comfortable with the information presented.
In conclusion I would highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in implementing search-using Solr. This is the definitive guide to keep on your desk and to dig deeper than what is available in the Solr docs.
The author takes the reader from the basic configuration with queries using the browser alongside cURL in Terminal. We are shown examples of searching a public art database as well as PDF text searching. We are introduced to building indexes, core types, and schema.xml files, followed by spatial and faceted searches and concepts in analyzing different strategies for constructing the right searches. Time is spent explaining how to maintain our indexes and shaping our user search experience for best results.
As the book goes into more advanced topics, the author covers moving from a single core to a multi-core and finally to distributed searches. There is a chapter on writing Solr plugins to further extend the application. The final chapter covers integrating Solr search into one’s web application and touches on using the most popular languages including PHP, Ruby, Python and others.
Each chapter is broken down into short explanations and examples, followed by a “Time For Action” section and then a “What Just Happened” section. This makes it very easy to focus in on one example at a time, testing it out while reading. Each chapter concludes with a quiz to further make sure the reader is comfortable with the information presented.
In conclusion I would highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in implementing search-using Solr. This is the definitive guide to keep on your desk and to dig deeper than what is available in the Solr docs.
April 3, 2014
For a project I needed to introduce search capabilities that would have killed my usual SQL-based approach. By accident I stumbled across this book and used it as a basis to decide whether to use Solr in my project. Bottom line: Solr is awesome and this book is an excellent introduction that will get you going quickly.
Coming from PHP I wasn't too keen to introduce any Java components in my deployments as I wasn't sure how they would integrate and whether they'd play nicely, but they sure do. This book covers Solr 4.5.0 and works quite well also for the most recent 4.7.0 release. At least I couldn't find any situations where it was wrong.
You will learn from this book how to create your own searches, index/import data from different sources (web, pdf and cdv files, databases), configuring tokenizers and tweaking search to suit your needs, geolocalization, and much more. This book goes beyond the simple beginner's topics and also addresses deployments with multiple instances (SolrCloud) and how to integrate with other systems such as Alfresco or even Wordpress.
The only downside I found is that the examples used in the book (and provided in full as a download) are a bit complex so you have to spend a little bit of time to replicate the environment to fully follow the book. On the other hand it provides an even better understanding of how things work together. Since many of the code examples are using XML it is very hard to read in the printed version of the book. Unfortunately the epub version does not support syntax highlighting so I suggest you go through code examples directly in an editor that supports syntax coloring.
I'd suggest the Apache Solr Beginner's Guide to anyone considering to use advanced search technology in general or Solr in specific and want to get a good and broad overview of its capabilities. It is as much hands-on as it covers all relevant areas.
Coming from PHP I wasn't too keen to introduce any Java components in my deployments as I wasn't sure how they would integrate and whether they'd play nicely, but they sure do. This book covers Solr 4.5.0 and works quite well also for the most recent 4.7.0 release. At least I couldn't find any situations where it was wrong.
You will learn from this book how to create your own searches, index/import data from different sources (web, pdf and cdv files, databases), configuring tokenizers and tweaking search to suit your needs, geolocalization, and much more. This book goes beyond the simple beginner's topics and also addresses deployments with multiple instances (SolrCloud) and how to integrate with other systems such as Alfresco or even Wordpress.
The only downside I found is that the examples used in the book (and provided in full as a download) are a bit complex so you have to spend a little bit of time to replicate the environment to fully follow the book. On the other hand it provides an even better understanding of how things work together. Since many of the code examples are using XML it is very hard to read in the printed version of the book. Unfortunately the epub version does not support syntax highlighting so I suggest you go through code examples directly in an editor that supports syntax coloring.
I'd suggest the Apache Solr Beginner's Guide to anyone considering to use advanced search technology in general or Solr in specific and want to get a good and broad overview of its capabilities. It is as much hands-on as it covers all relevant areas.
November 11, 2017
This book is way more than just a beginner's guide. We are using a hosted Solr solution at work and I must say this is the best intro to Solr I've come across so far - even though I've been using Solr already a bit, I've learned a great deal from this book and it's example based approach. Open source projects can be really hard to get started with because the community moves so fast, I wish I would have had this book when I got started.
The book is structured very well in a clear and concise manner. Each chapter starts with a practical problem like 'Indexing with local PDF files' or 'Using faceted search' it then first discusses the problem and the Solr way of solving it. After that the author walks you through the commands so you can test the solution immediately yourself. I highly recommend reading this book next to a computer so you can fire up your terminal any time and get the most out of its 'learning by doing' approach. Because of the book's example based structure it has also been a good resource for me to go back to at work - the Solr documentation lacks examples almost entirely, which makes this book a great desk companion.
The book is structured very well in a clear and concise manner. Each chapter starts with a practical problem like 'Indexing with local PDF files' or 'Using faceted search' it then first discusses the problem and the Solr way of solving it. After that the author walks you through the commands so you can test the solution immediately yourself. I highly recommend reading this book next to a computer so you can fire up your terminal any time and get the most out of its 'learning by doing' approach. Because of the book's example based structure it has also been a good resource for me to go back to at work - the Solr documentation lacks examples almost entirely, which makes this book a great desk companion.
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February 10, 2014Just began to understand solr
As an enthusiast of knowing new technologies,I determined to learn solr. there are several tutorials on net,but most of them said on how to install and that's it. I bought this book today and followed chapter 1 and half of chapter 2. now I am able to create own core and play with searches. my target is to complete this book by this Saturday. so far so good.
As an enthusiast of knowing new technologies,I determined to learn solr. there are several tutorials on net,but most of them said on how to install and that's it. I bought this book today and followed chapter 1 and half of chapter 2. now I am able to create own core and play with searches. my target is to complete this book by this Saturday. so far so good.
April 4, 2014
Apache Solr Beginner’s Guide is a very good book with lot of fundamentals covered for learning solr. I am a lucene beginner before starting this book. I do have knowledge about lucene before starting this book.That made me bit easy for understanding concepts. But i feel it is not mandatory to know about lucene before reading about solr. This book absolutely helps beginners even if you don't have knowledge about lucene. Great book to start with to learn about SOLR.
March 27, 2014
Hard to rate a techie book, but gave a better insight into Solr than the wiki. Would have preferred more of examples shown in the admin UI vs cURL.
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April 2, 2015vai a fare in gulo
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews