A Good Start, Falls Short
579760
I recently read several SOLR books, brushing up my skills making sure that I was current with the technology.  This fell short of the others and the promise of its title.

The books that I read in order of preference were:

<a data-hook="product-link-linked" class="a-link-normal" href="/Mastering-Apache-Solr-A-practical-guide-to-get-to-grips-with-Apache-Solr/dp/B00K67YYLS/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_txt?ie=UTF8">Mastering Apache Solr: A practical guide to get to grips with Apache Solr</a>
<a data-hook="product-link-linked" class="a-link-normal" href="/Scaling-Big-Data-with-Hadoop-and-Solr-Community-Experience-Distilled/dp/1783281375/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_txt?ie=UTF8">Scaling Big Data with Hadoop and Solr (Community Experience Distilled)</a>
<a data-hook="product-link-linked" class="a-link-normal" href="/Apache-Solr-High-Performance/dp/1782164820/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_txt?ie=UTF8">Apache Solr High Performance</a>

This book contains what I consider to be one of the most bizarre inclusions, Chapter 1 shows how to install SOLR as a service on windows.  Why you would ever want to do that is beyond me, I can only assume that the offer felt this inclusion would make the topic more accessible to those on the Windows platform.  I certainly hope nobody intends to run a serious SOLR installation on the Windows platform.  This is a recipe for frustration.  If however you are insistent in running on Windows, this is the book for you.

Chapter 2 provides excellent coverage of scoring and the various ways to leverage and control scoring within SOLR.

Chapter 3 is about performance optimization.  This chapter is good, but really just talks about the features that make SOLR performant. It provides detail on how to configure and use those features, but it does not address what I have found in my experience to be the crux of the problem of SOLR performance, system tuning.

Chapter 4 is labelled Additional Performance Optimization, but has little to do with performance and more to do with advanced SOLR features.  In fact use of most of these features can severely impact performance.  This chapter covers similar document queries, sorting by function, homophones, stopwords and word filtering.

Chapter 5 is Troubleshooting.  This chapter covers some very common scenarios that will inevitably happen in a production SOLR environment.  If nothing else the list of scenarios can be very useful in creating your disaster recovery plan.  That said, the list is not really complete, and the coverage is light.  For example one of the sections is basically just covering the use of optimize, as though that is a troubleshooting technique, and not a regular best practice.  The section on garbage collection is a good start, but really any book on SOLR should have a chapter dedicated to GC.

Chapter 6 is poorly named, "Performance Optimization with ZooKeeper".  It should have just been named "ZooKeeper".  ZooKeeper does nothing to improve the performance of SOLR, though it is a requisite stepping stone to the world of SOLR Cloud.  This chapter also does not discuss in detail making ZooKeeper performant.  Rather this chapter is a ZooKeeper tutorial, and a pretty good one.

And the book abruptly ends.  No further coverage of SOLR Cloud.  No coverage of high performance indexing or data ingestion.  No discussion of tuning SOLR for large installations, scaling search, balancing memory allocations, and so on.  There is a smattering of information throughout about performance optimized schemas, but it is not collected or concise.  I feel like the author hit his deadline and submitted what he had.

This book was a good start, but falls short of being more than an introduction to SOLR and certainly does not live up to its name.  This book provided very little in the way of code samples.  Most of the topics were covered at a very high level without significant detail.  For these reasons I rate it 3 stars.
4561775
I won this book from librarything member giveaways in exchange for an honest review.

Staying Human is a book about Jack, a being that has periods of black outs and amnesia, and during these times, terrible things happen. This book details his journey in figuring out who he is, and how he can stop this evil from progressing. He meets Leni and Sarah who make it more important to him to hang on to his humanity.

This book has an interesting premise. This being, Jack, has such promise as a character. He has lived for a long time and has seen evil in many different forms. I think that the author (who should be commended for writing a book at a young age of 20) wanted to make some philosophical thoughts in a sci fi sort of genre. It did not quite succeed.

There are issues with this book. First, it needs a good editing-- (used "mussel" instead of "muzzle," etc). Second, this book is supposed to be in first person, but it jumps to second and third person periodically when Jack is trying to explain what he is feeling, etc. Third, the phrasing in the book make it difficult to follow. Lastly, I would like to see more complexity in the plot and the characters. The best part of the book are the passages about Jack and Leni, and Jack and Sarah. But these interactions got lost in pages and pages of action that did not seem to further the book. In fact, it just seemed like a way to showcase places that the character was visiting. This book has that feel. It needs to have more of a complex plot arc.

That said, if Tobin writes every day, he can improve. This book is not a bad start, but he needs more time to mature his voice.
3776615
This book started off great - basically its about "lawyers" who use swords to decide who wins the case. True, its not the most original idea in the world, but the execution was very good. Our hero Loredan opens up a little shop to train young fencers-at-law, after narrowly avoiding his own death in a case he was lucky to win. Here is where the book loses its path for me. The pace slows right down and the book tries to turn itself into a political espionage type novel. I read and read waiting for something to happen but not much ever did. The characters were enjoyable, but the action wasn't. I'm sure this first book in a series of three is a good set up for a political espionage novel,[except for A game of Thrones of course]  but that's not really my cup of tea and should not be listed in the fantasy section. So I cant really make a fair review as I became jaded by the deception as to the type of book I was reading - however, I think that it was well written and anyone who can read fantasy without the need for dragons, magic, princesses, and monsters might like this series.
3397729
I've read many other books by John Van Stry, and this is the first book I was disappointed in. That said, I'm still giving it three stars; it's a decent book, but it's not as good as the author's other books. I'd characterize this book as an action-oriented urban fantasy with elements of a political thriller.

First, the good. The book includes well-written action scenes and a good plot. Character development is light, but that's OK for this style of book.

Now the bad. The villain is severely underdeveloped. We have no insight into the villain's motives until we get to a piteously short monologue at the end of the book. While John creates some mystery about the villain's identity -- this would be the 'political thriller' part of my characterization of the book -- I think it's poorly done, since I was able to identify the villain within the first quarter of the book. The book is slow to start; I put it down and almost didn't pick it back up.

The other books in this world (Wolf Killer and The King of Las Vegas) are both much better books.
4394183
I started this book with great excitement and high hopes. The premise sounded fascinating and it's the first book I've read by Ted Dekker (co-written with Erin Healy).

It started out great. The prologue grabbed me and I couldn't stop turning the pages. I read the first half in one day. Almost in one sitting. Twists, turns, high stakes, and a maze of clues all made for an exhilarating read. But, once Shauna starts figuring out who she can and cannot trust, it started to lose me. More than once, she puts herself in situations that make no sense. Her father, Landon McAllister, seems a bit gullible for a presidential candidate. And the final confrontation felt somewhat anticlimactic, with Shauna not taking a big enough role.

Having said all that, I still enjoyed the book and would rate it at 4 out of 5 stars. I just wish the end had lived up to the promise of the beginning.
502979
The idea for this mystery was an excellent one. The character and scene developments drew me in. However after the first half I found myself reading the beginnings of each paragraph, skipping to the next. And by the end I thought perhaps the author had been given a minimum of words/paragraphs and so he embellished. I would have been a lot more impressed had he edited the ending explanatory chapters into one concise chapter, then hinting more to come via a legal or police "venue." Both characters are strong enough to experience future compelling adventures.
3691030
I started out loving this book.  It had intrique, interesting characters, exciting locations, and a promising plot.  I even enjoyed the literary references.  Somewhere near the middle of the book I began to tire of it  all.  Yes, you can feel very clever when you know all the references.  Nonetheless, I still think that a book has to have a compelling plot to  deserve more than three stars.  This book started with a lot of potential  and ended as just an average book.
1816203
I think this is really a 2 and 1/2 star book. It is a promising first novel, but does not live up to all these four and five stars others have awarded it. There are some good action scenes, but some of the motives are a bit too much to handle. There is a lot of jumping back and forth from character to character and location to location. And there are a lot of characters to keep track off. I would expect this author to improve over time.
4232835
I will start off by saying that I did not dislike the writing. The author does a good job creating his world with visuals, action and through the eyes of the character. The concept behind the book is also interesting, and the lesson learned is ALSO good. So, why give it 3 stars?

The beginning of the book does a great job capturing interest. Everything, except Mark, stops just as he is about to be killed by a bus. At this point, Mark is stunned and predictably wants to know what is going on, so he investigates. He finds that, while he can interact with inanimate objects and move them, as soon as he throws something (or whatever), it freezes in mid air. This also includes a really mind bending thought that even the rays of light are frozen, so when Mark opens his curtains, it does not illuminate the room.
However, the more the book continues, the more it leaves this concept behind. Instead of investigating how or why it happened as a first thought/motive, he decides to go shopping. Literally the entire middle of the book is about Mark shopping, bathing and traveling. The details were, I thought, completely over the top. Using half a page explaining how Mark is going to have to buy a new backpack to carry things in because obviously a back pack is not big enough to do much with.
Anyway, the last 20 or 30 percent of the book is at least interesting, but has nothing to do with the concept of time stopping. Instead, Mark attempts to right a wrong between a married couple (who, I may add, are complete strangers to him). This unfolds into a sort of mystery/conspiracy, but only as Mark reads it on paper. This also produces nothing about the story, and ends quite abruptly. So does the book. Literally within about 3 or 4 sentences, the book suddenly ends. But I do want to add that it is a good ending, and we learn something from it.
However, I think he book would have been a lot more effective and a lot more compelling if it were a short story or a novella (between 60-100 pages). Honestly, I think it could have kept his shopping trips to a minimum detail, and he should have investigated why time stopped, or at least tried to retrace his steps around the bus.

In the end, there were a lot of good elements about the story, the book was well written, and I don't feel like I wasted my time. I just think the author could have given us the same story, with the same lesson, in close to half the pages. I give it a solid 3 stars.
2454584
Having read Lori Handeland's Crescent Moon  (book 4 in the Nightcreature series), I was looking forward to reading the Advance Reader copy of Any Given Doomsday. The start of a new series, this one gets off to a slow start. The first half of the book is bogged down in background and setup and at times leaves the reader as confused about what is going on as the lead character, Liz Phoenix, a psychic ex-cop who has quit the force rather than try to explain where her knowledge of crimes comes from.

Her foster mother is brutally murdered and first she, then a former boyfriend, Jimmy, are suspected. The boyfriend tells her she is in danger, then locks her in an abandoned house, where she is attacked by a supernatural body-snatching creature. Once he has been dealt with (due to a lucky choice of jewelry and bad footing), she and the boyfriend plant evidence to make it appear the unlucky snatchee killed her foster mother, then the take off cross country to visit her psychic teacher from her teen years (who she has a crush on and is equally afraid of). More supernatural events occur on the trip (including period visits with the dead foster mother thru dreams).

Halfway through the book, she (and we) find she gains powers by sleeping with others (who have powers due to partial demonic genetics, but who fight on the side of good, killing off demons who are on the other side). First sleeping with the former teacher, she gains the ability to shapeshift, but only when touching his magical tattoos. This apparently also unlocks her ability to gain powers through sex, as she later has an encounter with Jimmy and gains his powers as well (despite having slept with him long before, she received no powers previously).

As the first in a series, the book seemed to have just taken off in plot and character development, when it suddenly ended. And, of course, many threads were left unexplored (often in a rather obvious manner), setting up the stage for further episodes: where did Jimmy go, will Sawyer find (and kill) his mother, will Liz decide sleeping with women is worth the increase in power ("magic make-me dust" might not be enough temptation to sleep with her ex's next lover, but who knows what the next temptation will be?).

The second half of the book was definitely a more engaging read and the book as a whole is not for those who don't tolerate explicit sexual content. This book joins the current torrent in the dark fantasy/erotic genre popularized by Laurell K. Hamilton. Hopefully now that all that pesky background and development work has been taken care of, the following books in the series will maintain the pace set near the end.
3503634
The premise here is great - use real life case studies to illustrate forensic techniques, and to distinguish between actual available techniques and made up or exaggerated TV show techniques. Choose case studies with some recognizable backstory in order to add pizzazz. Try to keep the writing between middle grade and young YA in order to appeal to a wide readership. How could this be bad?

  Well, it isn't bad, it just doesn't deliver very strongly on its promise. There are only seven case studies. Three, Napoleon Bonaparte's cause of death, King Tut's cause of death, and the identification of Grand Duchess Anastasia, are pretty old hat for older readers, and not likely to fire up younger readers. The other four are pretty obscure. They turn on the death of Marie Antoinette's son, the identity of "The Man in the Iron Mask", the questionable suicide of Thailand's King Rama VIII, and the identification of bones of the Mayan King Kan Maax. Now, any of these stories can be made interesting, and they touch upon all kinds of historical, political, social and cultural issues. But they aren't very interesting from a forensic point of view, having been either easily solved, (Bonaparte, Anastasia), or unsolvable because of inadequate or incomplete or conflicting data.

  So, we get a big build up, a labored connection to a forensic tool, and then sort of a weak let down of a conclusion. (Anastasia and DNA, and Tut and CT Scans, are the ones with the strongest links, but they've been written about for ages). It seems that the book would have more nearly accomplished its aims if the emphasis had been on the forensics without regard to the notoriety of the relevant crime.

  But, that said, there is additional value in the form of sidebars and addenda. This book is set up like a textbook, with little framed bits of info, and sidebars, and insets, that wander into other cases or details about certain techniques, or chronologies or brief biographies. These little factoid bits do offer new and interesting insights into forensics and add somewhat to the narrative.

  So, of possible interest to a younger reader, but probably only a fairly motivated one. And it is nice to see a book that's science oriented and that plays it straight, (i.e. no cheesy chariots of the gods, Area 51, Bermuda Triangle type  references to try to make the book more appealing and "fun".

  Please note that I received a free advance ecopy of this book in exchange for a candid review. Apart from that I have no connection at all to the author or the publisher of this book.
3349350
While interesting, and a good first book, the later half feels rushed.
885167
On the plus side, I have to say that the book did pull me in, and I finished it easily. I like the characters, although we only get to really know a couple of them. There is potential for more growth there. Also, the ideas of genetic mutations and pagan mythology were interesting, and there is a lot that the author can do with that.

That's also the biggest drawback to this novel - there are lots of threads, lots of good ideas, but not enough of them came together. I understand wanting to have material for other books in the series, but things need to come together to a satisfying point in every book for it to be a great read. Things seemed to end too easily for my tastes, and some scenes could have been fleshed out to either weave some of the threads together or just add more dramatic tension.
959080
Good start but descended into a disappointing and dull text.
197287
Great beginning!  Most of the first half of the book is (to my tastes) too bogged down in personality conflicts and political intrigue, both individual and international.  I almost gave up on it.  Once the mission finally begins, it retained my interest.  Unfortunately, the later sections seem rushed and the ending suffers.  The concept is good, but the writing is uneven.  I wonder if this is a artifact of the collaboration of two writers.

 Based on the popularity of the 'reality' shows with folks younger than me, perhaps I am just too old for this style of writing.
2849358
The story started off well, with a catchy beginning.  You don't get too much detail about who the main character is, but you have a ribbon of a story starting, a ribbon that's easy to follow as it starts wildly zigging and zagging around the city - but I felt a little unhappy, just not as many details as I would have liked.  It seemed like it was rushing a bit to get through the plotline.  I expected some 'world building', some more history and background about this place the characters were living.  And you get a little of this, but not enough to make me happy, and I thought, for a standard fantasy novel, he should be paying a bit more attention to world building.  I need more details about whats' going on.

Well, without spoiling too much, let me say that after Hoodwink gets to that big Gate the story takes a turn, a nightmarish turn, which reminded me of a Twilight Zone tale of old.  I thought I was firmly in a fantasy novel, then suddenly it turned sci-fi, then quickly slipped to horror.  And then before I knew it the story was over, and I was plesantly surprised.

There's lots of clues in place for explaning more, and there are mysteries that have not been solved by this book, and I am hoping he can continue the promise that the second half of the story has given me.

So if you start the story, and think 'just another fantasty story in a weird world with nothing special going on', then keep reading!  And now, at the end of the story, I can appreciate the sparseness of the beginning, it gives more to be explained in the future.  A great young writer with a lot of promise, and a keen mind for twists and turns.  Also, I give props for the positive portrayal of women in the series so far.
4459420
This book gets off to a great start and presents a great concept that I feel a deep connection to. So, I had high hopes that this might be my favourite book of the year so maybe I started with unfair expectations.

Unfortunately, the two most important aspects of this book (to me, anyway) - how to choose what's essential and how to say no to everything else - were glossed over in a few pages. I can't work out what more focus wasn't paid on these areas.

Instead, lots of dubious personal anecdotes that pad the narrative, sometimes three in a row just to make one point - not very essentialist.

The last 1/3 of the book borrows heavily from the hot topics of the moment - mindfulness, cognitive biases, mastery, flow - these are all relevant but are only presented in very loose association with essentialism.

I would have loves to see more depth around essentialism rather than breadth of subject matter from other areas.