FWIW, picking up on Alexandre's point. One of my continual frustrations with virtually _all_ technical books is they become endless pages of details without ever mentioning why the hell I should care. Unfortunately, explaining use-cases for everything would only make the book about 10,000 pages long. Siiigggggh.
I guess you can take this as a vote for narrative.... Erick On Tue, May 28, 2013 at 4:53 PM, Jack Krupansky <j...@basetechnology.com> wrote: > 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 > http://vimeo.com/64886237 > > > -----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
