Big Data For Dummies Paperback – 5 April 2013

Very happy with the book I received and in very good condition.Delivery and packaging excellent condition.This a very good starting book on Big Data for those who want a good read.Normally I am not very good at reading long textbook but I have no problem reading this.It is well structured and you can jump between chapters or focus on what you need to understand.It won't make you an expert but you will have an insights on where to follow up to dig deeper.

Very pleased with this as an introduction to a rapidly evolving discipline and especially given all the hype from so called experts trying to make money out of Big Data tech or consultancy. The authors focus on core principles and approaches and I haven't found anything as well written and pitched at the right level of learning

The book explains the main ideas of "big data". There are brief introductions to common tools like MapReduce as well as discussions on "applying big data within your organisation".It's more of a business manager's overview rather than stepping stone to something more technical (if you want general ideas and buzzwords it is a great buy).The book is not a hands-on guide. It doesn't contain code (other than not-quite-pseudo-code) nor e.g. step by step instructions on a toy Hadoop setup. I.e. if you've actually got some data to crunch and want to use, say an existing network of commodity PCs (like your colleagues' desktops overnight!) then this is not the book for you!

Still in the first third of the book, but very happy so far.

This is a comprehensive book about big data, however it does assume a lot of prior technical knowledge about data management and associated technology. It is much more focused on and 'how' of big data and not the 'why' - still worth a read though

super

As a market researcher I was keen to see what this book had to offer, and how easy it would be to understand. There are some good points about how to introduce big data to an organisation, as well as the logistics. As well as introducing the concept this book also walks you through some of the most common tools. I really felt like this book would give me full confidence to branch down a more IT orientated road and integrate big data into projects.

Big Data For Dummies (For Dummies (Computers))The bulk of this book is taken up by describing the activities that have been in practice within the datawarehouse community for many years. It turns out that `Big-Data' is the latest name to be given to unstructured data such a text documents. There were some interesting sections describing the Hadoop parallel processing hardware, the Mapreduce software which controls it and the text processing software needed to make sense of the unstructured textural data. What was also interesting was learning about various advanced analytical tools, such as IBM's Watson. Once again I would say that these analytical tools have been around for some time before `Big-Data' became the latest management must-have. From a BI perspective `Big-Data' is just `More-Data' which brings with it the ever present problems of storing it and making sense of it within a reasonable time. The book frequently mentions social media data as a source, but even if you could gain access to it like the NSA have, where would be the business value in data like `OMG you should see the size of Sharon's melons, LOL :)'. An analytical tool capable of extracting the few pages within this book that relate to just `Big Data' would have proved invaluable.