Pro Hadoop (Expert's Voice in Open Source) [Paperback]

Jason Venner (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1430219424 | ISBN-13: 978-1430219422 | Publication Date: June 17, 2009 | Edition: 1

It’s a very safe bet that cloud computing interest increases and in fact, a near certainty. A recent estimate from Merrill Lynch suggested a $95 billion annual market by 2013. Hadoop is at the center of cloud computing: it is one of the most searched-for, documented, and prevalent form of cloud computing data access, and even in its pre-final form is already rich enough to support a consulting business model. Anyone wishing to investigate an enterprise-level cloud computing solution will need a Hadoop book to at least investigate the possibilities.

Hadoop is one of the tools that’s driving today’s developers to build tomorrow’s Software as a Service (SaaS)-based and driven Internet applications, invested in by Yahoo, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and more. With Hadoop, developers can build tomorrow’s data centers, or the next “Microsoft Office” or “Google Apps” - applications that are fully hosted on the Web, not the desktop – and much more.

Pro Hadoop will be the first to market with a professional guide and reference to getting up to speed with using, developing and working with Hadoop, an open source Java-based cloud computing framework and platform backed by Yahoo. This book will likely time with Hadoop 1.0 release in June 2009, also around JavaOne, the world’s largest Java conference at around 15,000 attendees on average.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Jason Venner has 20+ years of software engineering, managing, designing and coding. He has been a VP, director and consultant. Currently, his interests and expertise are in Java, Hadoop, Cloud Computing and more. For more, visit http://www.vennerable.com/ .

Product Details

• Paperback: 440 pages
• Publisher: Apress; 1 edition (June 17, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1430219424
• ISBN-13: 978-1430219422
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.9 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #104,632 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Less comprehensive than Tom White's Hadoop: The Definitive Guide but still a Good Buy, July 12, 2009

By 

Techie Evan - See all my reviews

This review is from: Pro Hadoop (Expert's Voice in Open Source) (Paperback)

The reason why I say this book's still a Good Buy is because Jason Venner has used Hadoop in several scenarios, and this book contains a lot of practical and time-saving tips on what mistakes to avoid or how to troubleshoot problems, making it an especially good book for Hadoop newbies. His materials on Testing and Debugging MapReduce Applications are also a value-add.

Chapter One provides detailed instructions on how to install Hadoop and how to run a test to verify that everything went fine. The author mentions that Hadoop 0.19 works best with Sun's JDK 1.6 and that although Hadoop will work on Windows with Cygwin installed, you have to be careful when specifying file paths.

Chapters Two and Three introduce basic concepts pertaining to MapReduce Jobs and Multimachine Clusters, respectively, and how "master" and "slave" nodes are configured. Chapter Four teaches you how to install, configure, and troubleshoot Hadoop Distributed File System.

Chapters Five and Six provide tutorials on the different types of inputs and outputs that a Hadoop MapReduce job can handle, and how to tune MapReduce jobs.

Chapter Seven is an excellent tutorial on how to unit test and debug MapReduce jobs, while Chapter Eight discusses more advanced MapReduce techniques for addressing more complex application requirements.

Chapter Nine walks you through the evolution of a (somewhat boring) real-world application, discussing rationales behind design changes, etc. Chapter 10 provides a few descriptive paragraphs each for various projects related to Hadoop (e.g., Pig, HBase, Mahout, ZooKeeper,etc). Finally, Appendix A is a detailed discussion of the JobConf API, JobConf being the object that controls information relating to a MapReduce job.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Mostly configuration not too much conceptual, February 13, 2010

By 

Sumit Pal (Boston, MA United States) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Pro Hadoop (Expert's Voice in Open Source) (Paperback)

I had lot of hopes from this book - but it was a let down - apart from the 1st 2 chapters.

Rest of the chapters mostly concentrated on minute details of configuration of a host of different parameters.

I was looking for a book - that gave back to the readers more on the conceptual side of Hadoop and on Map Reduce - with examples of being able to solve different flavour of problems.

I just skimmed over the chapters from chapter 3 onwards - since I found the configuration details too detailed.

However, if you consider from the point of view - of how difficult it can be to setup Hadoop - may be the configurations as discussed from Chapter 3 onwards are essential.

Now that Cloudera has come up with an easy to install Hadoop install - going though configuration and setup in a book at a very detailed level seems not necessary.

The pictures and diagrams ( though very few on this book ) are not very helpful and I felt were not thoughtfully made.

13 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Kindle Edition is Unreadable, April 15, 2010

By 

Chris Perkins (Ottawa, Canada) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Pro Hadoop (Kindle Edition)

I bought the Kindle edition of this book, but unfortunately it is unreadable. All the code samples (which are an absolutely essential part of a book like this) have been included as images in which the text has been reduced to the point where you would need a scanning electron microscope to read any of it. Amazon did promptly give me a refund, so no harm done, but if you have a regular-sized Kindle, don't bother with this one. It may be OK on the Kindle DX.