This is my first book, and I was out of my mind when I thought about writing an entire book in English, which is not my native language. Now it's done, and I have to thank all the people from Packt Publishing who have worked hard on this project, and for their huge patience in tolerating my bad attitude with schedules, formatting, and weird errors. I am thankful to them for their kindness and for always giving me the best suggestions. All the responsibility for some disjointed phrase, or some errors that survived the revisions, should be attributed only to me.

I also want to thank all the people on the Solr or Lucene mailing list. People who find and share solutions on a day-to-day basis without having the time to write a book. I have tried to cite every idea that comes to me by external, direct, or indirect suggestions, but as you see it's almost impossible. I've found inspiration from the books of David Smiley, Eric Pughs, and Jack Krupansky, and also from the huge contributions by the LucidWorks company, starting with the new reference guide.

I also want to thank professor Roberto Basili, who introduced me to this field some years ago.

I know I have probably oversimplified some of the more advanced topics, in order to expose readers to a broader vision of the context in which this technology exists. But when conducting technical courses I have learned that people often need to share ideas in order to construct their own path into a practical knowledge. So I thank you in advance for every time you'll want to share this read with your teammates, integrating different knowledge and points of view, exploring these topics outside an approach oriented merely to the technical features.

I want to give all my gratitude to my beloved father, who taught me to respect other's people work, and to my mother and sister for their constant trust in me. Also, I want to thank my friends for their support. However, this is only the first step, and I am supposed to do better in future with a little help from my friends.