Lucene in Action by Erik Hatcher, Otis Gospodneti

[Book Review Team]

<pre>Author/s : Erik Hatcher, Otis Gospodneti
Publisher : Manning
Category : Miscellaneous Java
Review by : Valentin Crettaz
Rating : 9 horseshoes</pre>
The advent of the Internet has brought the humanity to a new era where information has become the keystone of many businesses and human activities. The bad news is that the process of retrieving accurate information is often tedious and imprecise. Undoubtedly, we are all information addicts. We need relevant information and we need it now. Many companies, such as Yahoo!, Altavista, Google and some open-source movements, are striving to devise new algorithms and to create cutting edge tools whose primary goal is to ease the pain of retrieving information needles in the Internet and desktop haystacks.

This book is 100% dedicated to the Lucene search engine library, which one of those free medications that can considerably ease your pain of providing information retrieval support. The authors, who are both committers of the Lucene project, make an outstanding job of presenting the library and describing how to incorporate it into your system in order to leverage its flexible and powerful indexing and searching capabilities.

This book is the most comprehensive and up-to-date reference work on Lucene available on the bookshelves. It is targeted at developers of any level in strong need of powerful indexing and information retrieval support that can be plugged into the various lightweight and heavyweight systems they are developing. If you ever need to provide a search functionality to your users, the best advice I can give you is to grab this book and learn how to leverage Lucene's potential.


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[Book Review Team]

<pre>
Category :Miscellaneous Java
Review by : Ulf Dittmer
Rating : 9 horseshoes
</pre><review>The Lucene library is a powerful text indexing and retrieval engine. While it's not a complete search solution, its multifaceted API makes it easy to build one based on it. The examples shipping with it make it easy to get started with, but they only show a small excerpt of what the library is capable of. Without a guide, it's easy to overlook important details and helpful features.

That's where this book fits in. It devotes lengthy chapters to the two core activities of indexing and searching, and it offers multiple examples of how the library accomplishes those. It also explains the multiple extension points that it API offers, allowing a user to customize many aspects of its operation.

Further chapters discuss ports of Lucene to other languages, indexing rich document formats like Word, HTML, RTF and PDF, introduce the Lucene Sandbox which collects a variety of user contributions, and case studies of some advanced and uncommon usages.

The book is slightly outdated (it covers version 1.4, while 2.1 is released now), but with such a powerful API it's probably better to start out by using not all of its features anyway. A small gripe of this reviewer is that some advanced features are only hinted at, leaving the reader to piece the remainder together himself. But -- given the plentitude of material Lucene offers -- that's probably unavoidable, and doesn't detract from a book that must be considered indispensable by serious users.
More info at Amazon.com
More info at Amazon.co.uk
[ May 26, 2007: Message edited by: Book Review Team ]