We have just pushed another set of chapters for Hibernate Search in Action and reached the symbolic limit of 2/3. Yoohoo! We have also enhanced some of the existing chapters based on the feedbacks we received and the perseverance of our editor. They have just shipped as part of the early access program available in ebook format. I am very happy with the new chapters especially the description of analyzers in chapter 5.
I describe the use of Hibernate Search and the new Solr integration (coming up in Hibernate Search 3.1) to enable synonym, phonetic, n-gram and snowball search. Snowball is an algorithm that deduces the root of a word enabling searches for words of the same family: work, working, worker will all be reduced to the same root (called stemmer). The chapter both aims at demystifying analyzers and providing a concrete approach on how to use them. I really enjoyed writing it, I hope you will like reading it.
Beyond analyzers, here is a small list of the subjects I am personally happy with in the book:
- the introduction gives you a nice picture of what search is, why it matters nowadays and how it can be implemented in todays applications
- custom bridges: chapter 4 gives some nice examples of custom bridges including how to write one for composite identifiers
- mapping associations has always been a confusing subject for beginners. Chapter 4 comes with some nice diagrams that should clarify this topic
- chapter 5 explores when and how to use synchronous indexing, asynchronous indexing and clustered indexing (through JMS) and describes what is going on under the hood
We (and by we, I mean John) also have finished the Lucene dedicated content. While Hibernate Search hides the gory details of indexing and searching, its let you use all the flexibility of Lucene queries. Understanding Lucene is key and we have added the necessary knowledge you need for your daily work with Hibernate Search.
Let us know what you think and, of course, go buy the e-book :)
