MapReduce

There is an easier way to build Hadoop applications. With this hands-on book, you’ll learn how to use Cascading, the open source abstraction framework for Hadoop that lets you easily create and manage powerful enterprise-grade data processing applications—without having to learn the intricacies of MapReduce.

Working with sample apps based on Java and other JVM languages, you’ll quickly learn Cascading’s streamlined approach to data processing, data filtering, and workflow optimization. This book demonstrates how this framework can help your business extract meaningful information from large amounts of distributed data.

• Start working on Cascading example projects right away
• Model and analyze unstructured data in any format, from any source
• Build and test applications with familiar constructs and reusable components
• Work with the Scalding and Cascalog Domain-Specific Languages
• Easily deploy applications to Hadoop, regardless of cluster location or data size
• Build workflows that integrate several big data frameworks and processes
• Explore common use cases for Cascading, including features and tools that support them
• Examine a case study that uses a dataset from the Open Data Initiative
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Hadoop in Action teaches readers how to use Hadoop and write MapReduce programs. The intended readers are programmers, architects, and project managers who have to process large amounts of data offline. Hadoop in Action will lead the reader from obtaining a copy of Hadoop to setting it up in a cluster and writing data analytic programs.

The book begins by making the basic idea of Hadoop and MapReduce easier to grasp by applying the default Hadoop installation to a few easy-to-follow tasks, such as analyzing changes in word frequency across a body of documents. The book continues through the basic concepts of MapReduce applications developed using Hadoop, including a close look at framework components, use of Hadoop for a variety of data analysis tasks, and numerous examples of Hadoop in action.

Hadoop in Action will explain how to use Hadoop and present design patterns and practices of programming MapReduce. MapReduce is a complex idea both conceptually and in its implementation, and Hadoop users are challenged to learn all the knobs and levers for running Hadoop. This book takes you beyond the mechanics of running Hadoop, teaching you to write meaningful programs in a MapReduce framework.


This book assumes the reader will have a basic familiarity with Java, as most code examples will be written in Java. Familiarity with basic statistical concepts (e.g. histogram, correlation) will help the reader appreciate the more advanced data processing examples.