We'll have a blog for the book. We hope to have a first
raw/rough/partial/draft published as an e-book in maybe 10 days to 2 weeks.
As soon as we get that process under control, we'll start the blog. I'll
keep your email on file and keep you posted.
-- Jack Krupansky
-----Original Message-----
From: Swati Swoboda
Sent: Tuesday, May 28, 2013 1:36 PM
To: solr-user@lucene.apache.org
Subject: RE: Note on The Book
I'd definitely prefer the spiral bound as well. E-books are great and your
draft version seems very reasonably priced (aka I would definitely get it).
Really looking forward to this. Is there a separate mailing list / etc. for
the book for those who would like to receive updates on the status of the
book?
Thanks
Swati Swoboda
Software Developer - Igloo Software
+1.519.489.4120 sswob...@igloosoftware.com
Bring back Cake Fridays – watch a video you’ll actually like
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-----Original Message-----
From: Jack Krupansky [mailto:j...@basetechnology.com]
Sent: Thursday, May 23, 2013 7:15 PM
To: solr-user@lucene.apache.org
Subject: Note on The Book
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
