<p>Spark is one of the most widely-used large-scale data processing engines and runs extremely fast. It is a framework that has tools that are equally useful for application developers as well as data scientists.</p> <p>This book starts with the fundamentals of Spark 2 and covers the core data processing framework and API, installation, and application development setup. Then the Spark programming model is introduced through real-world examples followed by Spark SQL programming with DataFrames. An introduction to SparkR is covered next. Later, we cover the charting and plotting features of Python in conjunction with Spark data processing. After that, we take a look at Spark's stream processing, machine learning, and graph processing libraries. The last chapter combines all the skills you learned from the preceding chapters to develop a real-world Spark application.</p> <p>By the end of this book, you will have all the knowledge you need to develop efficient large-scale applications using Apache Spark.</p>