I recently got a chance to review Apache Solr 3.1 Cookbook by Rafal Kuc, published by PacktPub.

Now, to give a bit of context: I help folks implementing and customizing Solr professionally, so I know a fair bit of how Solr works, and am also quite familiar with the code internals. I was, therefore, pleasantly surprised when leafing through the table of contents, that there were at least a couple entries which had me wondering: Now how would I do that?

Here's the high-level TOC:

Chapter 1: Apache Solr Configuration
Chapter 2: Indexing your Data
Chapter 3: Analyzing your Text Data
Chapter 4: Solr Administration
Chapter 5: Querying Solr
Chapter 6: Using Faceting Mechanism
Chapter 7: Improving Solr Performance
Chapter 8: Creating Applications that use Solr and Developing your Own Solr Modules
Chapter 9: Using Additional Solr Functionalities
Chapter 10: Dealing with Problems

And here's a list of the recipes in Chapter 5, to give you a feel of the recipes:

Chapter 5: Querying Solr
Introduction
Asking for a particular field value
Sorting results by a field value
Choosing a different query parser
How to search for a phrase, not a single word
Boosting phrases over words
Positioning some documents over others on a query
Positioning documents with words closer to each other first
Sorting results by a distance from a point
Getting documents with only a partial match
Affecting scoring with function
Nesting queries

You can view the full table of contents from the PacktPub website.

Now, first of all, this book is like one of those cookbook-type books with lots of snippets of how to do stuff in Solr. If you know next to nothing about Solr, this book is not for you. As the PacktPub site says:

This book is part of Packt's Cookbook series… The recipes deal with common problems of working with Solr by using easy-to-understand, real-life examples. The book is not in any way a complete Apache Solr reference…

If, however, you're just past beginner level and wanting to dig a little deeper into Solr and find the FAQs, tutorials, Solr Wiki etc too confusing/verbose/unorganized, then I think Apache Solr 3.1 Cookbook is probably exactly what you need.

The examples are concise, stand-alone, and can be readily implemented in 5 minutes or less. They're a non-threatening way to get past the beginner level, and also offer a glimpse at some of Solr's more advanced functionality.

Oddly enough, the reviews on the web (amazon.com, goodreads and google books) all rate this book mediocrely, with an average of 3+ stars. In my opinion, this book easily deserves at least 4, if not 4.5 stars, assuming you're not a complete Solr n00b.

OK, I admit the writing is a little repetitive at times (the author's Polish), and some of the recipes are really, really basic, but nonetheless, for a cookbook-style guide aimed at the beginner-intermediate crowd, I think it's great!

Get it from amazon here: http://amzn.to/LNHQxo.
More details at PacktPub

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