Hadoop: The Definitive Guide helps you harness the power of your data. Ideal for processing large datasets, the Apache Hadoop framework is an open source implementation of the MapReduce algorithm on which Google built its empire. This comprehensive resource demonstrates how to use Hadoop to build reliable, scalable, distributed systems: programmers will find details for analyzing large datasets, and administrators will learn how to set up and run Hadoop clusters. Complete with case studies that illustrate how Hadoop solves specific problems, this book helps you:

• Use the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) for storing large datasets, and run distributed computations over those datasets using MapReduce

• Become familiar with Hadoop's data and I/O building blocks for compression, data integrity, serialization, and persistence

• Discover common pitfalls and advanced features for writing real-world MapReduce programs

• Design, build, and administer a dedicated Hadoop cluster, or run Hadoop in the cloud

• Use Pig, a high-level query language for large-scale data processing

• Take advantage of HBase, Hadoop's database for structured and semi-structured data

• Learn ZooKeeper, a toolkit of coordination primitives for building distributed systems

If you have lots of data -- whether it's gigabytes or petabytes -- Hadoop is the perfect solution. Hadoop: The Definitive Guide is the most thorough book available on the subject. "Now you have the opportunity to learn about Hadoop from a master-not only of the technology, but also of common sense and plain talk." -- Doug Cutting, Hadoop Founder, Yahoo!

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 8 Ratings

Partly succeeds - 2009-09-08
Reviewer Rating:
Tom White certainly writes very well: this book is very readable. It is also quite comprehensive, falling somewhere between a tutorial and a reference.

That being said, I was ultimately rather disappointed. First, and most importantly, it was not clear to me after reading this book how I might use Hadoop for some of my projects, or if indeed they were good candidates for MapReduce. I feel it should have been possible to provide some generic guidance. Second, some chapters are written by other authors, and these did not uniformly provide the same quality of instruction, reading occasionally like advertisements.

I confess I am puzzled by the number of encapsulating and utility APIs that have grown up around Hadoop. Why do we need Pig, HBase, Hive, Zookeeper and Cascading? Apparently because (according to what I have read here), bare Hadoop is hard to program with (productively). Some indication of how these wrappers interact with each other would have been helpful.

As it is, I feel LESS urge to evangelize for Hadoop having read this book. Surely not the desired effect?

Don't understand all the other negative reviews - 2009-07-23
Reviewer Rating:
This is the book to get if you are actually doing something with Hadoop. It's been a lifesaver, and has answered all our questions of, "I wonder if I can do x in Hadoop?"
It gives a lot of information about the internals of Hadoop, which you will want to know when things go wrong or when you just want to get more out of Hadoop.
I normally don't post reviews as much, but I think Tom White and this book deserves way more than 5 stars, so I'm not sure why it only has 3 stars on Amazon.

First 25 Pages Have You Up And Running! - 2009-08-24
Reviewer Rating:
I picked up this book to catch up on Hadoop, which the rest of my team has been using for several months. Unfortunately I was too busy with other projects to spend any time on MapReduce and thought it'd be a grueling process to be brought up to speed on it. Within the first 25 pages and about 3 hours, Tom had me up and running my first MapReduce job which I successfully adapted for a specific metric we were trying to generate. The book does a great job of breaking down Hadoop's complex pieces into easy to understand components, but doesn't try and pump you full of conceptual BS before it lets you touch real code.

If I were to make any suggestions it would be to start the book off with some simple instructions for installing and getting Hadoop up and running on a local machine, followed by some simple explanations of DFS and Hadoop's commands for managing the file system. I would also explain much earlier how to get your classes recognized by Hadoop for those a bit rusty at Java. Fortunately, the online Wiki was very good about providing instructions to get me going on a Mac, and that took a majority of OS-specific needs off the burden of the book. You will, no doubt, have to be intelligent to read this book, but if you're using Hadoop, there is already a prerequisite for technical proficiency you'll need to satisfy. Overall good job, Tom.

Very comprehensive book - 2009-08-31
Reviewer Rating:
I bookmarked this book for several months and bought it very rapidly after its availibility. It's a very comprehensive book, very deep and cover many various aspects of Hadoop and related technologies. I recommend it without any doubt, enjoy reading and learning.

Excellent book on all aspects of Hadoop - 2009-08-05
Reviewer Rating:
Excellent book. Covers a lot of ground on all aspects of Hadoop.

This book was my point of reference for setting up and testing up a small cluster. Best detailed description I've found yet on the flow of data through a map and reduce job.

Small negative is the content is a little scattered - need to flip back and forth between chapters.

Strongly recommend.

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