Big Data for Chimps

Preface

Big Data for Chimps will explain a practical, actionable view of big data. This view will be centered on tested best practices as well as give readers street-fighting smarts with Hadoop.

Readers will come away with a useful, conceptual idea of big data. Insight is data in context. The key to understanding big data is scalability: infinite amounts of data can rest upon distinct pivot points. We will teach you how to manipulate data about these pivot points.

Finally, the book will contain examples with real data and real problems that will bring the concepts and applications for business to life.

What This Book Covers

Big Data for Chimps shows you how to solve important problems in large-scale data processing using simple, fun, and elegant tools.

Finding patterns in massive event streams is an important, hard problem. Most of the time, there aren’t earthquakes—but the patterns that will let you predict one in advance lie within the data from those quiet periods. How do you compare the trillions of subsequences in billions of events, each to each other, to find the very few that matter? Once you have those patterns, how do you react to them in real time?

We’ve chosen case studies anyone can understand, and that are general enough to apply to whatever problems you’re looking to solve. Our goal is to provide you with the following:

• The ability to think at scale--equipping you with a deep understanding of how to break a problem into efficient data transformations, and of how ...