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)

Tackle Big Data – Spark Comes to the Party

An approximate answer to the right problem is worth a good deal more than an exact answer to an approximate problem.
- John Tukey

In this chapter, you learn about data analysis and big data; we see the challenges that big data provides and how they are dealt with. You will learn about distributed computing and the approach suggested by functional programming; we introduce Google's MapReduce, Apache Hadoop, and finally Apache Spark and see how they embrace this approach and these techniques.

In a nutshell, the following topics will be covered throughout this chapter:

  • Introduction to data analytics
  • Introduction to big data
  • Distributed computing using Apache Hadoop
  • Here comes Apache Spark