Book Review: Hadoop In Practice (2nd Edition)

This is a book review for Hadoop In Practice (2nd Edition)

Definitely not the first book you should read for understanding Hadoop. The book's author recommends Hadoop In Action, but I personally believe that Hadoop in Action is a bit dated, its being updated (as per Manning's website), till then, I would recommend Hadoop The Definitive Guide (3rd Edition). 

The  book is broken up into four parts, with part one providing some background on Hadoop.

The book assumes basic knowledge of Hadoop and Hadoop Ecosystem, the first chapter quickly runs over the basics. The second chapter introduces YARN (Hadoop 2.0 resource negotiator)  and explains how MR (Map-Reduce) works as a YARN application.

Part Two deals with Data in Hadoop, the different data formats,  organize and load data into Hadoop. If you have every wondered how to create InputSplits for XML files in a MR task, chapter 3 answers it.

Part Three deals with Big Data patterns. For me this section is the reason to buy the book.  The part on Graph Traversal and other Graph Algorithms (like Friend of Friends) were really useful.

The book closes out with chapters on Hive and how to write YARN applications. 

The first edition on the book had chapters on recommendation engines and integrating R with Hadoop, these are now available as free chapters on the book's website.

All in all it’s a practioner's book explains in comprehensive details and good examples the different challenges developer's face with Hadoop. All the examples in the book are updated to run with Hadoop 2.0. At different points in the book how other components like Apache Girafe, Mahout, Hive, Parquet work with Hadoop. I would say the book is an essential reference for any developer who is working with Hadoop on a regular basis.