Chapter 1, The Big Data Core Technology Stack, introduces you to the concepts of big data and the core technologies that comprise it. This knowledge is essential as the foundation of learning Cascading.

Chapter 2, Cascading Basics in Detail, we will begin our exploration of Cascading. We will look at its intended purpose, how it is structured, how to develop programs using it base classes, and how it then manages the execution of these programs.

Chapter 3, Understanding Custom Operations, is based on the newly acquired Cascading knowledge. We will learn more advanced Cascading features that will truly unleash the power of the Cascading API. We will concentrate on an in-depth discussion about operations and their five primary types.

Chapter 4, Creating Custom Operations, will show you how to actually write a custom operation for each type of operation. This is done after we've completely explored and understood the anatomy of operations in the previous chapter.

Chapter 5, Code Reuse and Integration, introduces you to learning how to assemble reusable code, integrating Cascading with external systems, and using the Cascading instrumentation effectively to track and control execution. Specifically, we will discuss how Cascading fits into the overall processing infrastructure.

Chapter 6, Testing a Cascading Application, provides in-depth information on how to efficiently test a Cascading application using many techniques.

Chapter 7, Optimizing the Performance of a Cascading Application, provides in-depth information on how to efficiently optimize a Cascading application and configure the underlying framework (Hadoop) for maximum performance.

Chapter 8, Creating a Real-world Application in Cascading, takes everything we learned and creates a real-world application in Cascading. We will use a practical case study, which could be easily adapted to a functional component of a larger system within your organization.

Chapter 9, Planning for Future Growth, provides information that will allow you to continue to advance your skills.

Appendix, Downloadable Software, provides information that will allow you to download all the code from the book.

Software:

OS:

This book is intended for software developers, system architects, system analysts, big data project managers, and data scientists.

The reader of this book should have a basic understanding of the big data paradigm, Java development skills, and be interested in deploying big data solutions in their organization, specifically using the Cascading open source framework.

In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "A key script, such as hadoop-env.sh, is needed in instances where environment variables are set."

A block of code is set as follows:

public class NLPUtils
{
  /* Parse text into sentences
   * @param text - document text
   * @return String
   */
  public static String[] getSentences(String text)
  {
    String sentences[]=text.split("[.?!]");
    for (int i=0; i< sentences.length; i++)
    {
      sentences[i]=sentences[i].trim();
    }
    return sentences;
  }
}

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

Tap docTap = new FileTap (inputScheme, args[0]);
Tap sinkTap = new FileTap(outputScheme, args[1], SinkMode.REPLACE );
Pipe inPipe = new Pipe("InPipe");
Pipe pipeTextProcess = new SubAssemblyExample(inPipe);
Flow flow = new LocalFlowConnector();

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

hadoop jar myjob.jar com.ai.jobs.MainJob data/input data/output

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Right-click on the project and navigate to DebugAs | DebugConfigurations…."

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