The Reference Guide describes all of the important features and functions of the LucidWorks for Solr Certified Distribution. It's available free when you download the LucidWorks for Solr Certified Distribution, or to download separately  as an e-book.

Designed to provide complete, comprehensive documentation, the Reference Guide is intended to be more encyclopedic and less of a cookbook. It is structured to address a broad spectrum of needs, ranging from new developers getting started to well experienced developers extending their application or troubleshooting. It will be of use at any point in the application lifecycle, for whenever you need deep, authoritative information about Solr.

The material as presented assumes that you're familiar with some basic search concepts and that you can read XML; it does not assume that you are a Java programmer, although knowledge of Java is helpful when working directly with Lucene or when developing custom extensions to a Lucene/Solr installation.

Key topics covered in the Reference Guide include:

• Getting Started: This chapter guides you through the installation and set-up of the LucidWorks for Solr Certified Distribution.
• Using the Admin Web Interface: introduces the Solr Web interface. From your browser, you can view configuration files, submit queries, view logfile settings and Java environment settings, and monitor and control distributed configurations.
• Documents, Fields, and Schema Design: describes how Solr organizes its data for indexing. It explains how a Solr schema defines the fields and field types which Solr uses to organize data within the document files it indexes.
• Understanding Analyzers, Tokenizers, and Filters: explains how Solr prepares text for indexing and searching. Analyzers parse text and produce a stream of tokens, lexical units used for indexing and searching. Tokenizers break field data down into tokens. Filters perform other transformational or selective work on token streams.
• Indexing and Basic Data Operations: describes the indexing process and basic index operations, such as commit, optimize, and rollback.
• Searching: presents an overview of the search process in Solr. It describes the main components used in searches, including request handlers, query parsers, and response writers. It lists the query parameters that can be passed to Solr, and it describes features such as boosting and faceting, which can be used to fine-tune search results.
• The Well Configured Solr Instance: discusses performance tuning for Solr. It tells you how to configure multiple SolrCores, how to configure the Lucene index writer, and more.
• Managing Solr: discusses important topics for running and monitoring Solr. It describes running Solr in the Apache Tomcat servlet runner and Web server. It also describes LucidGaze, Lucid Imagination's tool for statistical reporting about Solr. Other topics include how to back up a Solr instance, and how to run Solr with Java Management Extensions (JMX).
• Scaling and Distribution: tells you how to grow a Solr distribution by dividing a large index into sections called shards, which are then distributed across multiple servers, or by replicating a single index across multiple services.
• Client APIs: tells you how to access Solr through various client APIs, including JavaScript, JSON, and Ruby.