The Reference Guide describes all of the important features and functions of Apache Solr. It's available online in the Documentation Center 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: Installing Solr and getting it running for the first time.
• Using the Solr Admin Web Interface: How to use the built-in UI.
• Documents, Fields, and Schema Design: Designing the index for optimal retrieval.
• Understanding Analyzers, Tokenizers, and Filters: Setting up Solr to handle your content.
• Indexing and Basic Data Operations: Indexing your content.
• Searching: Ways to improve the search experience for your users.
• The Well Configured Solr Instance: Optmal settings to keep the system running smoothly.
• Managing Solr: Web containers, logging and backups.
• Scaling and Distribution: Best practices for increasing system capacity.
• Client APIs: Clients that can be used to provide search interfaces for users.