Preface

To quote a famous blue hedgehog, Gotta Go Fast! When it comes to data, speed is important. It doesn't matter if you're collecting or analyzing data or developing utilities for others to do so, performance and efficiency are going to be huge factors in your technology choices, not just in the efficiency of the software itself, but also in development time. You need the right tools and the right technology, or you're dead in the water.

The Apache Arrow ecosystem is developer-centric, and this book is no different. Get started with understanding what Arrow is and how it works, then learn how to utilize it in your projects. You'll find code examples, explanations, and diagrams here, all with the express purpose of helping you learn. You'll integrate your data sources with Python DataFrame libraries such as pandas or NumPy and utilize Arrow Flight to create efficient data services.

With real-world datasets, you'll learn how to leverage Apache Arrow with Apache Spark and other technologies. Apache Arrow's format is language-independent and organized so that analytical operations are performed extremely quickly on modern CPU and GPU hardware. Join the industry adoption of this open source data format and save yourself valuable development time creating high-performant, memory-efficient, analytical workflows.

This book has been a labor of love to share knowledge. I hope you learn a lot from it! I sure did when writing it.