Big Data Fundamentals with PySpark

This chapter introduces the exciting world of Big Data, as well as the various concepts and different frameworks for processing Big Data. You will understand why Apache Spark is considered the best framework for BigData.

The main abstraction Spark provides is a resilient distributed dataset (RDD), which is the fundamental and backbone data type of this engine. This chapter introduces RDDs and shows how RDDs can be created and executed using RDD Transformations and Actions.

In this chapter, you'll learn about Spark SQL which is a Spark module for structured data processing. It provides a programming abstraction called DataFrames and can also act as a distributed SQL query engine. This chapter shows how Spark SQL allows you to use DataFrames in Python.

PySpark MLlib is the Apache Spark scalable machine learning library in Python consisting of common learning algorithms and utilities. Throughout this last chapter, you'll learn important Machine Learning algorithms. You will build a movie recommendation engine and a spam filter, and use k-means clustering.