Book Image

Frank Kane's Taming Big Data with Apache Spark and Python

By : Frank Kane
Book Image

Frank Kane's Taming Big Data with Apache Spark and Python

By: Frank Kane

Overview of this book

Frank Kane’s Taming Big Data with Apache Spark and Python is your companion to learning Apache Spark in a hands-on manner. Frank will start you off by teaching you how to set up Spark on a single system or on a cluster, and you’ll soon move on to analyzing large data sets using Spark RDD, and developing and running effective Spark jobs quickly using Python. Apache Spark has emerged as the next big thing in the Big Data domain – quickly rising from an ascending technology to an established superstar in just a matter of years. Spark allows you to quickly extract actionable insights from large amounts of data, on a real-time basis, making it an essential tool in many modern businesses. Frank has packed this book with over 15 interactive, fun-filled examples relevant to the real world, and he will empower you to understand the Spark ecosystem and implement production-grade real-time Spark projects with ease.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
7
Where to Go From Here? – Learning More About Spark and Data Science

Ratings histogram walk-through


Remember the RatingsHistogram code that we ran for your first Spark program? Well, let's take a closer look at that and figure out what's actually going on under the hood with it. Understanding concepts is all well and good, but nothing beats looking at some real examples. Let's go back to the RatingsHistogram example that we started off with in this book. We'll break it down and understand exactly what it's doing under the hood and how it's using our RDDs to actually get the results for the RatingsHistogram data.

Understanding the code

The first couple of lines are just boilerplate stuff. One thing you'll see in every Python Spark script is the import statement to import SparkConf and SparkContext from the pyspark library that Spark includes. You will, at a minimum, need those two objects:

from pyspark import SparkConf, SparkContext 
import collections 

SparkContext, as we talked about earlier, is the fundamental starting point that the Spark framework gives you...