Wednesday, December 30, 2015

Apache Solr Enterprise Search Server -- Third edition

This year gave me a chance to be a technical reviewer of the book with search engine topic. The title is Apache Solr Enterprise Search Server and it saw the light in its third edition. The first edition back in 2010 helped me to start thinking in NoSQL way, despite that SQL has been literally everywhere (well, and still is). It does take a bit of mind warping to think beyond relational database lingo and data modelling and in my opinion is rather useful for your career as a software engineer.



Here goes my review on Amazon:

This book in its first edition was the first one around back in 2010, that covered Apache Solr in as much detail as I needed to get into the topic quickly. This third edition includes revisions for Apache Solr 5, notoriously covering things like Solr admin page, SolrCloud, scaling the search engine for large amount of documents, text analysis, indexing, search and even map-reducing your Solr index! In particular, throwing a MapReduce task at large-scale indexing task has been hard / unclear in the past and now it is available to any user of Apache Solr out of the box. This makes books like this immensely important to not waste one's time in looking around for useful bits of information scattered here and there. More importantly, authors of the book are directly involved into the project, either as Apache Solr / Lucene committers or active practitioners and developers of the technology. So I recommend this book for an entry-level and mid-level search engineers that look into getting their hands dirty with search problems and / or improving on the previously untapped areas of the search engine world.