But Wait, What about Big Data?
You've heard the term big data even more than data science most likely. Is this a book on big data?
That depends on how you define big data. If you define big data as computing simple summary statistics on unstructured garbage stored in massive, horizontally scalable, NoSQL databases, then no, this is not a book on big data.
If you define big data as turning transactional business data into decisions and insight using cutting-edge analytics (regardless of where that data is stored), then yes, this is a book about big data.
This is not a book that will be covering database technologies, like MongoDB and HBase. This is not a book that will be covering data science coding packages like Mahout, NumPy, various R libraries, and so on. There are other books out there for that stuff.
But that's a good thing. This book ignores the tools, the storage, and the code. Instead, it focuses as much as possible on the techniques. There are many folks out there...