Preface

The term "Big Data" is all over tech news. But what does it really mean? Big Data refers to the problem of trying to process and analyze large amounts of data. Generally, Big Data refers to the petabytes of data, which is over 1 million gigabytes. You are likely to face your own Big Data issues, just on a smaller scale. If you only have one web server, processing or analyzing a database of only one gigabyte can be overwhelming.

Another part of the Big Data problem is the source and format of the data. It is coming from many sources and it's not easy to match all of the data points. You probably have years of transactional data in a MySQL database, as well as APIs to Google Analytics, Facebook, Twitter, and any other services your company uses.

Once you can figure out how to process the data, you need to do something with it. That's where jqPlot comes in. Using charts to display large datasets makes it easier to see trends or correlations in the data. jqPlot allows you to create charts quickly so that you can move on to analyze your data.

Many technical books give examples that don't match anything you might deal with in the real world. I'm writing this book about the various problems we face working in the fictional company jQ Big Box Electronics. We will work through real-world examples that reflect the reality of the "Big Data" world we live in. I hope that placing these examples in a practical context will help you understand the rationale for using a certain chart for a particular dataset and build on the skills you will acquire from this book.