Pro Apache Hadoop 2nd ed. Edition

This book is excellent, and this is coming from a guy who hated almost every other hadoop book he read. There are a couple things that these authors do different from other hadoop authors:1. They thoroughly explain the difference between all the hadoop versions, and what things are compatible/incompatible with one another. It covers YARN in detail.2. They explain how to do things using both the old and the new hadoop APIs. This is so important because a lot of code has already been developed for the old API, and people are likely to encounter that at work.3. They include import statements in their code samples, I can't tell you how many times I read other documentation that omitted the import statements and it made things so confusing for me. This is especially important with hadoop, because there are a lot of classes in their APIs with the same names but in different packages.4. They have a hadoop administration chapter, which is a big deal to me because I have struggled desperately to make hadoop run in the past. It is not easy by any means. They cover multiple ways to get hadoop running: using cloudera's VM, using amazon's cloud, and setting things up yourself. They explain the config files and what all of their settings do too.I would recommend reading this book BEFORE you read "Hadoop: The Definitive Guide" because this will get you up to speed faster. Since the definitive guide gives you a lot of fine details, it is not a good starter book.

This was my first book about Hadoop and I found the explanations and techniques to be well written. The authors are experts in the field as they point out many gotchas along the way. Knowing some Java is a prerequisite for this book as there are a lot of code examples.Most of the first half of the book covers Hadoop directly including how to configure Hadoop, how to do MapReduce, and other common techniques. The later part of the book looks a lot at tools that interact with Hadoop such as Pig, Hive, HCatalog, HBase, Hama, Spark and some others.The main example used in this book is word count spread across many documents. This example worked well as it is was easy to understand, and it was the same topic that the original MapReduce was based on. Over the course of the book the authors allow the example to get more and more complex, while providing clear explanations.I found the flow and the writing of the book to be excellent. At the beginning there are clear high level explanations of different Big Data tools. There is no fluff at all, the book is purely technical in this sense.

As another reviewer mentioned, this is an excellent first book for Hadoop. It covers Hadoop 2.0 in great detail while still staying within familiar ground for most readers since it uses SQL to explain Hadoop concepts. The code examples are consistent and help illustrate the points. The chapters on Hadoop administration focus on the practical aspects you are likely to use at work.One area where the book shines is in its treatment of Large Table Joins. Secondary Sort is an important and extremely practical concept which is usually only mentioned in passing in other books. But this book devotes almost an entire chapter to it and demonstrates its use for Large Table Joins. The authors have gone deep into the Hadoop source code and described the underlying Hadoop framework where appropriate.The treatment of Hadoop libraries like HBase and Pig is also unique. Instead of being focused on just the usage of these libraries the focus is on explaining the underlying concepts and the describing how these libraries work internally as well as where their use is appropriate.The book leave you with a sense of not just how Hadoop should be used but also how Hadoop works on the inside. A great effort from the authors.

Im already familiar with MRv1 but YARN was little bit confusing for me.A lot of IT books are full of dummy stories (Ex-wife, kids vacation, etc...) things that the reader doesn't care about and most the time ittakes the reader outside out the book BUT this books isn't like that at all.So far I read only the first 3 chapters and it's amazing !!!It really help me fully understand HDFS architecture and YARN (Resource manager, node manager, etc...)

Not much to post, I normally evaluate something like this by deciding if I would or wouldn't buy it again; in other words, a five or a one. Strong points included a focus on newer technologies such as YARN, and special kudos for using SQL as the example for explaining map reduce. I would buy it again.

I've had the privilege of working on some projects with two of the authors and to witness the level of attention and time they poured into this book. I have a copy and am looking forward to learning from it.

This book expects readers to be fluent with Java. I know many other languages, but not java. There is a pretty strong community of programmers using other languages (esp. python) with hadoop; while I know that many users of hadoop are java developers, hadoop supports other languages as well. The blurb describing the book should have stated (as is stated in the introduction) that java skills are presumed.

Perfect book to start with.

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