Book Image

Scala and Spark for Big Data Analytics

By : Md. Rezaul Karim, Sridhar Alla
Book Image

Scala and Spark for Big Data Analytics

By: Md. Rezaul Karim, Sridhar Alla

Overview of this book

Scala has been observing wide adoption over the past few years, especially in the field of data science and analytics. Spark, built on Scala, has gained a lot of recognition and is being used widely in productions. Thus, if you want to leverage the power of Scala and Spark to make sense of big data, this book is for you. The first part introduces you to Scala, helping you understand the object-oriented and functional programming concepts needed for Spark application development. It then moves on to Spark to cover the basic abstractions using RDD and DataFrame. This will help you develop scalable and fault-tolerant streaming applications by analyzing structured and unstructured data using SparkSQL, GraphX, and Spark structured streaming. Finally, the book moves on to some advanced topics, such as monitoring, configuration, debugging, testing, and deployment. You will also learn how to develop Spark applications using SparkR and PySpark APIs, interactive data analytics using Zeppelin, and in-memory data processing with Alluxio. By the end of this book, you will have a thorough understanding of Spark, and you will be able to perform full-stack data analytics with a feel that no amount of data is too big.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)

Summary

In this chapter, we have explored some functional programming concepts in Scala. We have seen what functional programming is and how Scala supports it, why it matters, and the advantages of using functional concepts. We have seen why learning FP concepts is important in learning the Spark paradigm. Pure functions, anonymous functions, and higher-order functions were discussed with suitable examples. Later in this chapter, we saw how to handle exceptions in the higher-order functions outside collections using the standard library of Scala. Finally, we discussed how functional Scala affects object mutability.

In the next chapter, we will provide an in-depth analysis on the Collections API, one of the most prominent features of the standard library.