Packt Publishing has sent to me another book this time about Apache Solr and the topic is related to how administer your Solr instance.
The book is titled Administrating Solr and it is written by Surendra Mohan and the main goal is focused on managing a Solr instance for contents manipulated by Drupal as described in the last chapter.
The first chapter introduces Solr starting from the installation and showing the execution of all the standard queries available in a standard Solr environment.
I have appreciated the second chapter about monitoring that is a really important topic to know for administering a Solr instance and many of the topics of this book will give you a complete knowledge about these types of tasks. Here you also will see how to perform faceting, ranking, geospacial and distributed searches.
Another important chapter is the third that is about how you should manage the Solr instance in terms of application management, so you will learn how to backup and restore your indexes and how to distribute your storage.
The rest of the book will give you a complete and detailed overview about how to optimize and configure many different aspects of Solr for your production environment.
I think that this book is covering many important arguments and it will be probably very useful for any developer that is starting to approach to Solr and who want to understand how to manage and monitor its own instance in a better way.
Some of these topics are: language detection, business rules, OpenNLP. The rest of the book will cover a specific usage dedicated to Drupal, unfortunately I'm not a Drupal expert so I can't say nothing about this.
A bad point is that the business rules section requires the knowledge of JBoss Drools, in the book you will find a very short overview about it. I think that is not enough even if I understand the scope of the book I would like to see here a better introduction to this framework.
It also requires a specific knowledge about Drupal for the last part of the book, but here it makes sense.
I would like to thank Packt Publishing for providing me a digital copy of the book.