This week's book giveaway is in the Agile and other Processes forum. We're giving away four copies of The Mikado Method and have Ola Ellnestam and Daniel Brolund on-line! See this thread for details.
In your experience(s), how quickly does one go from Hadoop newbie to using it with success?
Sometimes, I feel like I've avoided trying/getting into Hadoop because there seems to be a lot to it - clusters, hdfs, etc. Could I spend a weekend fooling around and end up pretty comfortable?
Depends on what you mean by "comfortable". I'd say no.
andrew ennamorato
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Good question. Comfortable enough to setup a small cluster, put some files on HDFS, run a few m/r tasks, etc. Not be an expert or anything, but enough to try out a few ideas and see how it works.
Chuck Lam
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I've seen a number of courses in universities where students are expected to get up to speed on Hadoop in about 2-4 weeks. My memory is a bit vague on this one, but I do remember somewhere that a mid-term homework assignment was to implement PageRank over Wikipedia articles using Hadoop. I would certainly consider that a "comfortable" level.
Of course, your learning curve will vary depending on your background and available resources. The courses I referred to above almost always require "distributed systems" as a prerequisite. The classes also usually have a test cluster already set up. If you're setting one up yourself, factor in some time on learning systems administration.
andrew ennamorato
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Chuck,
Good to know. I've been wanting to pick up a copy of your book just for the M/R chapters anyway (maybe to use as a guide for CouchDB's internal M/R functionality), so if I don't win one I'll spring for it regardless.
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