Hadoop For Dummies

Introduction

Welcome to Hadoop for Dummies! Hadoop is an exciting technology, and this book will help you cut through the hype and wrap your head around what it’s good for and how it works. We’ve included examples and plenty of practical advice so you can get started with your own Hadoop cluster.

About this Book

In our own Hadoop learning activities, we’re constantly struck by how little beginner-level content is available. For almost any topic, we see two things: high-level marketing blurbs with pretty pictures; and dense, low-level, narrowly focused descriptions. What are missing are solid entry-level explanations that add substance to the marketing fluff and help someone with little or no background knowledge bridge the gap to the more advanced material. Every chapter in this book was written with this goal in mind: to clearly explain the chapter’s concept, explain why it’s significant in the Hadoop universe, and show how you can get started with it.

No matter how much (or how little) you know about Hadoop, getting started with the technology is not exactly easy for a number of reasons. In addition to the lack of entry-level content, the rapid pace of change in the Hadoop ecosystem makes it difficult to keep on top of standards. We find that most discussions on Hadoop either cover the older interfaces, and are never updated; or they cover the newer interfaces with little insight into how to bridge the gap from the old technology. In this book, we’ve taken care to describe ...