Lucene In Action (In Action)

Rating:
Summary: Excellent book written by experts
Review: The authors are extremely helpful and active in the lucene mailing lists/faq. It's a pleasure to have a book written by people with not only practical experience using lucene, but actually develop the code itself. This book does an excellent job of introducing lucene and providing practical applications for it. A must have for any lucene user.

Rating:
Summary: Incorporate Search In Your Own Applications
Review: The open source movement continues to grow at a surprising rate. Lucene is a library of programs that facilitates the consturction of a surprisingly powerful search engine. Note it is not a search engine, it is a library of programs that you can use as components in your search engine.

As with the other titles in Manning's "in action" series, this is a quick and easy guide to making Lucene work. It starts with the construction of an application using the library and quickly goes further into using all of the packages in the Lucene distribution.

The book stresses that Lucene is general enough to be used in a wide selection of appplications and shows some applications beyond the standard word search.


Rating:
Summary: No serious complaints, just not strong enough for 5 stars
Review: This book, although well written, struck me more as a "The Missing Manual" style of book rather than an "In Action" book. Open Source projects are notorious for lacking documentation or scattered "getting started" tutorials that possess poor cohesion (more a fault of the nature of software development, the projects are voluntary and I've never met a software developer who ENJOYED documentation). This book fills the necessary gap and provides in-depth knowledge of the Lucene API and logic flow.

The first chapter begins by describing the importance of search and the history of Lucene (nice intro).

The next six chapters (2 - 7) follow on to describe the pertinent sections of Lucene that encompass its searching engine (very nicely written and useful for ANYONE that wants to expand on what Lucene offers out of the box or needs to diagnose behavior that isn't at first apparently obvious).

Chapter eight describes the Lucene Sandbox where utility programs for Lucene are developed and maintained. This chapter was useful to the extent that it introduced you to several of the more usable items that are in the sandbox at the time of writing but, and as they point out in the introduction to the chapter, the information will undoubtably become outdated within a short matter of time.

Chapter nine, while academic, was not necessarily useful (IMO) to the overall theme of the book.

Chapter ten, again while interesting in a general search engine context, was not overly useful for applying Lucene (at least for my applications).

The indices:
A - encompased the general installation of Lucene (useful information but better placed on the same website where you download the binaries/source)
B - a detailed description of the index file generated by Lucene (a perfect use of an index)
C - a list of resources relevant to Lucene development/application (again, another good use of an index)

Rating:
Summary: Solid introduction to Lucene
Review: This is a solid, well-written, introduction to Lucene and related technologies. The book starts with an introduction to the architecture of Lucene, replete with a simple sample application, then goes into an in-depth review of the indexing, searching and querying. XML and HTML indexing are also covered. As are performance issues. The last chapter covers related technologies and other implementations of Lucene into other languages.

This is the best book I have seen on Lucene. It's an informative, fun read, that is worth the money if Lucene is central to your application.