Erick, your point is well taken. Although my primary interest/skill is to
produce a solid foundation reference (including tons of examples), the real
goal is to then build on top of that foundation.
While I focus on the hard-core material - which really does include some
narrative and lots of examples in addition to tons of "mere" reference, my
co-author, Ryan Tabora, will focus almost exclusively on... narrative and
diagrams.
And when I say reference, I also mean lots of examples. Even as the
hard-core reference stabilizes, the examples will continue to grow ("like
weeds!").
Once we get the current, existing, under-review, chapters packaged into the
new book and available for purchase and download (maybe Lulu, not decided) -
available, in a couple of weeks, it will be updated approximately every
other week, both with additional reference material, and additional
narrative and diagrams.
One of our priorities (after we get through Stage 0 of the next few weeks)
is to in fact start giving each of the long Deep Dive Chapters enough
narrative lead to basically say exactly that - why you should care.
A longer-term priority is to improve the balance of narrative and hard-core
reference. Yeah, that will be a lot of pages. It already is. We were at 907
pages and I was about to drop in another 166 pages on update handlers when
O'Reilly threw up their hands and pulled the plug. I was estimating 1200
pages at that stage. And I'll probably have another 60-80 pages on update
request processors within a week or so. With more to come. That did include
a lot of hard-core material and example code for Lucene, which won't be in
the new Solr-only book. By focusing on an e-book the raw page count alone
becomes moot. We haven't given up on print - the intent is eventually to
have multiple volumes (4-8 or so, maybe more), both as cheaper e-books ($3
to $5 each) and slimmer print volumes for people who don't need everything
in print.
In fact, we will likely offer the revamped initial chapters of the book as a
standalone introduction to Solr - narrative introduction ("why should you
care about Solr"), basic concepts of Lucene and Solr (and why you should
care!), brief tutorial walkthough of the major feature areas of Solr, and a
case study. The intent would be both e-book and a slim print volume (75
pages?).
Another priority (beyond Stage 0) is to develop a detailed roadmap diagram
of Solr and how applications can use Solr, and then use that to show how
each of the Deep Dive sections (heavy reference, but gradually adding more
narrative over time.)
We will probably be very open to requests - what people really wish a book
would actually do for them. The only request we won't be open to is to do it
all in only 300 pages.
-- Jack Krupansky
-----Original Message-----
From: Erick Erickson
Sent: Wednesday, May 29, 2013 7:19 AM
To: solr-user@lucene.apache.org
Subject: Re: Note on The Book
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
