Thanks, Erick. I could do the experiment of publishing both spiral and
perfect found and see which "wins". Spiral does have the one downside of not
standing out on a shelf. But, for now, I'll focus on getting the (rough
draft) e-book available ASAP.
-- Jack Krupansky
-----Original Message-----
From: Erick Erickson
Sent: Sunday, May 26, 2013 11:08 AM
To: solr-user@lucene.apache.org
Subject: Re: Note on The Book
Jack:
Kudos for carrying on! Having a contract canceled after putting a lot
of work into it must be a bummer...
Personally I'm not buying many paper books any more, so the e-book
version is preferable for me, so take this with a grain of salt.. but
make the paper version spiral bound, _please_. I wish every reference
book or cookbook or whatever, really anything I have to look at when
my fingers are busy doing something else was spiral bound....
Best
Erick
On Thu, May 23, 2013 at 7:14 PM, Jack Krupansky <j...@basetechnology.com>
wrote:
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
