Book Image

Scala and Spark for Big Data Analytics

By : Md. Rezaul Karim, Sridhar Alla
Book Image

Scala and Spark for Big Data Analytics

By: Md. Rezaul Karim, Sridhar Alla

Overview of this book

Scala has been observing wide adoption over the past few years, especially in the field of data science and analytics. Spark, built on Scala, has gained a lot of recognition and is being used widely in productions. Thus, if you want to leverage the power of Scala and Spark to make sense of big data, this book is for you. The first part introduces you to Scala, helping you understand the object-oriented and functional programming concepts needed for Spark application development. It then moves on to Spark to cover the basic abstractions using RDD and DataFrame. This will help you develop scalable and fault-tolerant streaming applications by analyzing structured and unstructured data using SparkSQL, GraphX, and Spark structured streaming. Finally, the book moves on to some advanced topics, such as monitoring, configuration, debugging, testing, and deployment. You will also learn how to develop Spark applications using SparkR and PySpark APIs, interactive data analytics using Zeppelin, and in-memory data processing with Alluxio. By the end of this book, you will have a thorough understanding of Spark, and you will be able to perform full-stack data analytics with a feel that no amount of data is too big.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)

Introduction to functional programming

In computer science, functional programming (FP) is a programming paradigm and a unique style of building the structure and elements of computer programs. This uniqueness helps treat the computation as the evaluation of mathematical functions and avoids changing-state and mutable data. Thus, by using the FP concept, you can learn to code in your own style that ensures the immutability of your data. In other words, FP is about writing pure functions, about removing hidden inputs and outputs as far as we can, so that as much of our code as possible just describes a relationship between inputs and outputs.

This is not a new concept but the Lambda Calculus, which provides the basis of FP, was first introduced in the 1930s. However, in the realm of programming language, the term functional programming refers to a new style of declarative programming...