Erik Hatcher, Solr Committer, reviews Solr 1.4 Enterprise Search Server

Posted by: Eric Pugh on January 11, 2010

When I first got involved in writing Solr 1.4 Enterprise Search Server I knew that one of the folks I wanted to have review the book was Erik Hatcher, a Solr committer, and who introduced me to the project.

He has written a very indepth review, that I’ll admit I was nervous to read! But he summed it up as:

Grand Finale
I spelled out a lot of fiddly feedback above, and I expect the great addendum wiki page will factor in any keepers from this review. Of course most of the review points out mistakes or differences of opinion, that’s what a review is for, though this is a solid, useful book. So, if you’re considering using Solr, this book is for you. If you’re already using Solr, you’ll likely pick up a useful trick or three. Go get it!

As you can see from the level of detail in his post, when we come out with a second version of the Solr book, updating it for changes between when we published it and the final release of Solr 1.4 will be very easy!

Eric Pugh

About Eric Pugh

Fascinated by the “craft” of software development, Eric Pugh has been heavily involved in the open source world as a developer, committer, and user for the past 5 years. He is an emeritus member of the Apache Software Foundation and lately has been mulling over how we move from the read/write web to the read/write/share web.

In biotech, financial services and defense IT, he has helped European and American companies develop coherent strategies for embracing open source software. As a speaker he has advocated the advantages of Agile practices in software development.

Eric became involved in Solr when he submitted the patch SOLR-284 for Parsing Rich Document types such as PDF and MS Office formats that became the single most popular patch as measured by votes! The patch was subsequently cleaned up and enhanced by three other individuals, demonstrating the power of the Free/Open Source Model to build great code collaboratively. SOLR-284 was eventually refactored into Solr Cell as part of Solr version 1.4.

Eric co-authored “Solr 1.4 Enterprise Search Server”, the first book on Solr.

He blogs at http://www.opensourceconnections.com/blog/.