Many of today's applications need to be able to process large volumes of data, and vertical scaling has its limits both in terms of prohibitive cost and hardware limits. Gearman is an open source job manager that is well-suited to building horizontally scalable systems, from map-reduce algorithms to simple data processors capable of handling massive amounts of information. Instant Gearman is a practical, hands-on guide to getting started with building an open source job management server system that is built to grow. Learn the basics of building a distributed application that spans multiple components and learn how Gearman fits into building an application that scales from one to hundreds of components that interact to process data. With Gearman, you can build software that scales horizontally as your need for computation increases. Instant Gearman has in-depth examples and a step-by-step approach to building distributed systems, helping you to build systems that are scalable and modular in their approach to processing data. Once you are comfortable with building simple workers and clients, learn how to build a cluster of managers and see how to reduce single-point-of-failure in your architecture. Next, build a simple map-reduce application using Gearman and scale it up from a single instance to multiple parallel processing components.