Loading
Cover of Learning Spark: Lightning-Fast Data Analytics

Book guide and evaluation

Learning Spark: Lightning-Fast Data Analytics

Jules S. Damji,Brooke Wenig,Tathagata Das,Denny Lee

English Beginner Data Analytics
5.0 / 5

1 reviews

2020

Published

399

pages

534

views

Data is getting bigger, arriving faster, and coming in varied formats — and it all needs to be processed at scale for analytics or machine learning. How can you process such varied data workloads efficiently? Enter Apache Spark. Updated to emphasize new features in Spark 2.x.,

Before you read

What will you get from this book?

Data is getting bigger, arriving faster, and coming in varied formats — and it all needs to be processed at scale for analytics or machine learning. How can you process such varied data workloads efficiently? Enter Apache Spark. Updated to emphasize new features in Spark 2.x., this second edition shows data engineers and scientists why structure and unification in Spark matters. Specifically, this book explains how to perform simple and complex data analytics and employ machine-learning algorithms. Through discourse, code snippets, and notebooks, you’ll be able to: • Learn Python, SQL, Scala, or Java high-level APIs: DataFrames and Datasets • Peek under the hood of the Spark SQL engine to understand Spark transformations and performance • Inspect, tune, and debug your Spark operations with Spark configurations and Spark UI • Connect to data sources: JSON, Parquet, CSV, Avro, ORC, Hive, S3, or Kafka • Perform analytics on batch and streaming data using Structured Streaming • Build reliable data pipelines with open source Delta Lake and Spark • Develop machine learning pipelines with MLlib and productionize models using MLflow • Use open source Pandas framework Koalas and Spark for data transformation and feature engineering

Ask this book

Your question is answered in the context of this title and author. Each answer uses 2 points.

Sign in to ask the book assistant.

Reader reviews

1 reviews, 5.0 average out of 5

Nandan Vatsyayan

2025/06/06

5 / 5

Highly recommend this book for beginners looking to get into Spark programming. Examples are shown with both Python and Scala. I found the authors writing style extremely pleasant. Being a technical book the explanations were very easy to follow. Complicated technical terms are explained in very simple english.

I have the kindle edition and noticed that the formulas on one of the pages on machine learning was slightly cutoff at the edges but I wont remove a star because of that. In my view there are tons of material online to understand those regression formulas. What really worked for me is how great a job the authors have done in explaining how to use Spark 3.0.

Since I am a Python and SQL user this book really benefits me at work. The syntax and function explains are very clear and with an online Databricks account one can really practice as you learn with an uncomplicated dataset. How to program the Dataframe API is really well covered.

Write a review

Sign in to publish a review.

Reader questions and answers

Ask a focused question and learn from the community.

Sign in to ask or answer a question.

No questions yet

Be the first to ask a clear, useful question.