It's quite a long book covering many aspects of Solr, I've read it end-to-end (stupid habit of mine) but I think it would be much better used as a reference. The problem I have with the book is that it's dealing with Solr 4 which is quite outdated by this time (I'm working with Solr 7 day to day and many things have changed). My overall experience was that Solr documentation is good but working examples on the web are not numerous (and mostly focus around ElasticSearch) and if you're a newbie it might be hard to get started with just the documentation. So it's still good to read that book to get a grasp of what Solr _can_ do and then you can dive into features that you need and read documentation around them on the web. But then when you try to implement things there will still be a lot of things to discover ...
Well written, good coverage of the topic, great introduction that let me impress everyone at work ("I thought you didn't know anything about solr?" "I didn't, but I read a book")
Finally got around to finishing this one. A great technical book. Covers everything from the technical details of how SOLR works, to ideas for using SOLR for practical requirements (collaborative filtering, data mining). Very readable and also very detailed, with no extra verbiage and nothing missing. A great achievement in the technical book world!
Overall this was a pretty good book on Solr. Gave a wide variety of problems. Some parts of the book were dry if you are not solving certain problems, but definitely will use this book as a reference.
The definitive guide to Solr 4! Covers a wide variety of topics with the appropriate level of detail. As a bonus it comes with almost no spelling errors or stylistic quirks and was a real pleasure to read.