Hadoop For Dummies

Chapter 3

Setting Up Your Hadoop Environment

In This Chapter

Deciding on a Hadoop distribution

Checking out the Hadoop For Dummies environment

Creating your first Hadoop program: Hello Hadoop!

This chapter is an overview of the steps involved in actually getting started with Hadoop. We start with some of the things you need to consider when deciding which Hadoop distribution to use. It turns out that you have quite a few distributions to choose from, and any of them will make it easier for you to set up your Hadoop environment than if you were to go it alone, assembling the various components that make up the Hadoop ecosystem and then getting them to “play nice with one another.” Nevertheless, the various distributions that are available do differ in the features that they offer, and the trick is to figure out which one is best for you.

This chapter also introduces you to the Hadoop For Dummies environment that we used to create and test all examples in this book. (If you’re curious, we based our environment on Apache Bigtop.)

We round out this chapter with information you can use to create your first MapReduce program, after your Hadoop cluster is installed and running.

Choosing ...