To those of you who may have heard about the Lucene/Solr book that I and two others are writing on Lucene and Solr, some bad and good news. The bad news: The book contract with O’Reilly has been canceled. The good news: I’m going to proceed with self-publishing (possibly on Lulu or even Amazon) a somewhat reduced scope Solr-only Reference Guide (with hints of Lucene). The scope of the previous effort was too great, even for O’Reilly – a book larger than 800 pages (or even 600) that was heavy on reference and lighter on “guide” just wasn’t fitting in with their traditional “guide” model. In truth, Solr is just too complex for a simple guide that covers it all, let alone Lucene as well.
I’ll announce more details in the coming weeks, but I expect to publish an e-book-only version of the book, focused on Solr reference (and plenty of guide as well), possibly on Lulu, plus eventually publish 4-8 individual print volumes for people who really want the paper. One model I may pursue is to offer the current, incomplete, raw, rough, draft as a $7.99 e-book, with the promise of updates every two weeks or a month as new and revised content and new releases of Solr become available. Maybe the individual e-book volumes would be $2 or $3. These are just preliminary ideas. Feel free to let me know what seems reasonable or excessive. For paper: Do people really want perfect bound, or would you prefer spiral bound that lies flat and folds back easily? I suppose we could offer both – which should be considered “premium”? I’ll announce more details next week. The immediate goal will be to get the “raw rough draft” available to everyone ASAP. For those of you who have been early reviewers – your effort will not have been in vain. I have all your comments and will address them over the next month or two or three. Just for some clarity, the existing Solr Wiki and even the recent contribution of the LucidWorks Solr Reference to Apache really are still great contributions to general knowledge about Solr, but the book is intended to go much deeper into detail, especially with loads of examples and a lot more narrative guide. For example, the book has a complete list of the analyzer filters, each with a clean one-liner description. Ditto for every parameter (although I would note that the LucidWorks Solr Reference does a decent job of that as well.) Maybe, eventually, everything in the book COULD (and will) be integrated into the standard Solr doc, but until then, a single, integrated reference really is sorely needed. And, the book has a lot of narrative guide and walking through examples as well. Over time, I’m sure both will evolve. And just to be clear, the book is not a simple repurposing of the Solr wiki content – EVERY description of everything has been written fresh, from scratch. So, for example, analyzer filters get both short one-liner summary descriptions as well as more detailed descriptions, plus formal attribute specifications and numerous examples, including sample input and outputs (the LucidWorks Solr Reference does a better job with examples as well.) The book has been written in parallel with branch_4x and that will continue. -- Jack Krupansky
