In this chapter, you explored the reasons to choose Cassandra from among the many databases available, and having determined that Cassandra is a great choice, you installed it on your development machine.

You had your first taste of the Cassandra Query Language when you issued your first command via the CQL shell in order to create a keyspace. You're now poised to begin working with Cassandra in earnest.

In the next chapter, we'll begin building the MyStatus application, starting out with a simple table to model users. We'll cover a lot more CQL commands, and before you know it, you'll be reading and writing data like a pro.