Customer Reviews

Pro Hadoop (Expert's Voice in Open Source)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

I've been hearing about Hadoop and the MapReduce paradigm for some time now and I have been wondering how it would work for me. I decided to pick up this book and learn even further how I could use Hadoop.

The author does a nice job of explaining what a MapReduce job is and how you can put it to use and get usable data out of seemingly uncomprehensible junk. This was instrumental in pitching the idea to upper management.

Chapters 2 through 5 were quite helpful while installing and setting up a cluster (and single instance) of Hadoop. There is alot of information out on the web, but it is very unstructured and difficult to follow. I don't think we could have done it without help from the book. It is worth mentioning that Cloudera does have a nice virtual machine image that you can download for free which already has everything set up. This VM image could save you alot of time during a Proof of Concept.

Chapters 8 and 9 further explain different problems and the Hadoop approaches to solving them. I'm not sure how applicable these examples are in the real world, but they definitely illustrate how you should approach a problem that you intend to solve via MapReduce with Hadoop.

Since reading this book, my team and I have successfully built a 4 machine Hadoop cluster to process logs from our application so that we may provide better analytics and better predict spammers. Pro Hadoop served as a good reference each time we hit a roadblock.

I'd recommend this book to anyone who is looking to learn more about Hadoop and MapReduce techniques and I'd say it is a must have for anyone who is looking to implement Hadoop.

This book has a good overview of Hadoop concepts and plenty of detail on Hadoop cluster setup. I also have Tom White's "Hadoop: The Definitive Guide" which has more detail on APIs.

The Kindle edition of this book is perfectly readable on my 6" Kindle 2, although the code samples are significantly lighter than the rest of the text.

I read the Hadoop defenetive guide from Yahoo press before I got Pro Hadoop and I feel Pro Hadoop is really awesome book to start and makes you really good at Hadoop MapReduce...

i recommend this 10/10 (Make sure you get the book with latest hadoop API updates)