Okay, it's DONE. Here's the Lulu link, ready to go:
http://www.lulu.com/shop/jack-krupansky/solr-4x-deep-dive-early-access-release-1/ebook/product-21079719.html
(Or, go to Lulu.com and just search for "Solr" - It's the only hit so far.)
Price is $9.99 for now (I get $8.10 of that, BTW, in case you're wondering
how Lulu works - minus $0.90 (10%) "base price" to host the file,
bandwidth, credit card processing, etc., and minus another $0.90 (10%) for
Lulu's "share, a total of 19% to Lulu.)
I'll see how the response is over the next two weeks and maybe adjust the
price. I almost went with $14.99 or even $19.99, but I decided this was a
decent introductory special. I mean, if it was complete, I might sell the
e-book for $25 or $29.99 or so.
This pricing and distribution is all an experiment and subject to change at
any time.
Thanks for all the feedback!
Seriously, if you want to wait two weeks or a month for cleanup, go right
ahead. I thought of delaying so that "everything looks right", but I decided
that some us us just want the facts and the "finish" is not as important.
I'll try to cater to both.
I'll spend another week or so on cleanup, and then decide whether to
intensify "finish" work, or focus on adding more content, like highlighting,
distributed search, DIH, core and collection management, or maybe even
Spatial.
Here are the topics that are NOT in the current early-access edition:
- SolrCloud
- Traditional Distributed Solr - shards, master/slave, replication
- Data Import Handler (DIH)
- Core management
- Collection management
- Admin UI
- Admin API
- Luke
- CheckIndex
- Spatial and Geospatial search
- Highlighting
- Query elevation
- Autocomplete deep dive
- SolrJ API
- UI example
- Application layer example
- Terms Component
- Term vectors component
- Javabin format
- Deeper coverage of DocValues (mentioned in Faceting)
All of those are candidates for work over in the coming months.
Here are aspects that are NOT under consideration and beyond the current
anticipated scope of the book, for now:
- Cookbook approach to Solr
- Deployment, such as configuring Tomcat
- Tuning, estimation, performance optimization
- Troubleshooting
- Tips
- Security
- Access control
- Document-level access control
- Relevance Tuning
- Data Modeling
- How to develop custom plugin code
- Lucene API itself
- Diagrams - sorry, I'm a text guy - but contributions are welcome
- Details of Lucene index format
- Details of Lucene document scoring and relevancy
- Non-Java client APIs
-- Jack Krupansky
-----Original Message-----
From: Jack Krupansky
Sent: Friday, June 21, 2013 9:04 AM
To: solr-user@lucene.apache.org
Subject: The book: Solr 4.x Deep Dive - Early Access Release #1
I’m expecting to self-publish the first Early Access Release for my book,
Solr 4.x Deep Dive, on lulu.com sometime today. It is still far from
finished and needs lots of work and missing a lot of important areas
(SolrCloud and distributed Solr in general, DIH, highlighting, core and
collection API, admin API and UI, query elevation, etc.), but I think there
is a critical mass of useful material that is a decent foundation to build
the rest of the book on. For those who participated in the early chapter
review process for the book’s predecessor (Lucene and Solr: The Definitive
Guide), most of those review chapters (at least the ones authored by me) are
included, plus a bunch more, especially chapters on indexing data, update
processors, and faceting. The new book is Solr-only. Alas, I have not
incorporated most of the reviewer feedback yet as I have been focused on
writing for the indexing and faceting chapters for the past two months.
It will be e-book (PDF) only for the time being. Don’t even think about
printing it yourself – over 1,100 pages, and counting! Currently a 5MB
download.
I still haven’t settled on pricing. For early access, the intent is that
people will want to check back every couple weeks or month or two, more like
a subscription. My current thought is to treat it as if it were a $60 to $80
paper book bought once per year, but on a monthly subscription, say $5 to $8
per download. My expectation is to update roughly every two weeks, or at
least monthly, as new material is added, issues resolved, and new Solr
releases. In the early going, I’ll probably update the PDF on lulu every
week.
Given this rough model, what price point has the most appeal: $2.99 (yeah,
who doesn’t want it, but little incentive for me!), $4.99 (seems reasonable,
but incentive for me is still low although marginally acceptable), $7.99
(starting to get steep for an EA multi-download), $9.99 (better incentive
for me, but will people pay it?). Thoughts?
None of this is cast in stone. My current thought is to publish this initial
release at $4.99 or $7.99, and then set a revised price for the second or
third release.
If I hear nothing, I’ll go ahead with $7.99, although I might go with $4.99.
Thanks in advance for any feedback!
-- Jack Krupansky
