Spark is a very powerful data processing platform supporting a uniform programming model. It supports application development in Scala, Java, Python, and R, providing a stack of highly interoperable libraries used for various types of data processing needs, and a plethora of third-party libraries that make use of the Spark ecosystem covering various other data processing use cases. This chapter gave a brief introduction to Spark and setting up the development environment for the Spark application development that is going to be covered in forthcoming chapters of the book.
The next chapter is going to discuss the Spark programming model, the basic abstractions and terminologies, Spark transformations, and Spark actions, in conjunction with real-world use cases.