We're writing new introductory documentation for Xapian. See the formatted output at http://getting-started-with-xapian.readthedocs.org/
Join in on channel #xapian on irc.freenode.net (webchat link: http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=%23xapian).
This repository will be merged into the main Xapian tree and disappear once ready.
You will need the Sphinx documentation tool installed to process the documentation. Confusingly there are several open source projects called "Sphinx" - see http://sphinx-doc.org/install.html for tips on installing the one you want. We aren't certain exactly what version is needed - it seems Sphinx 0.6.4 is too old but 1.1.3 is new enough.