Creating a small prototype of searches to test real data is a good way to identify a path for acquiring knowledge for a beginner when starting with new technologies. A prototype is indeed a working example that we can create at the beginning, even when we do not have a final analysis of the data model, or a complete collection of real data. This is useful to fix ideas, to test on 'almost real' data, and to create shared knowledge with the team, while doing tests. While dealing with real-world text, the kind of queries needed and the expected behaviors often appear to be clear by intuition, and we are able to eventually study how to specifically resolve them properly, one at a time. This is probably not that far from what you would discuss with your team and your clients or customers, too, and in this sense Solr can be used as a good tool to get them more involved in your design methodologies, especially if you use some kind of incremental development approach.

The path /SolrStarterBook/resources/pdfs/ contains a directory of the sources of PDF files exported from free online repositories, which can be used as a source for our experimentations. You can also use your own collection as a simple test case for a new simple index.