Big Data for Dummies

by Judith Hurwitz, Marcia Kaufman, Fern Halper

Find the right big data solution for your business or organizationBig data management is one of the major challenges facing business, industry, and not-for-profit organizations. Data sets such as customer transactions for a mega-retailer, weather patterns monitored by meteorologists, or social network activity can quickly outpace the capacity of traditional data management tools. If you need to develop or manage big data solutions, you'll appreciate how these four experts define, explain, and guide you through this new and often confusing concept. You'll learn what it is, why it matters, and how to choose and implement solutions that work.Effectively managing big data is an issue of growing importance to businesses, not-for-profit organizations, government, and IT professionalsAuthors are experts in information management, big data, and a variety of solutionsExplains big data in detail and discusses how to select and implement a solution, security concerns to consider, data storage and presentation issues, analytics, and much moreProvides essential information in a no-nonsense, easy-to-understand style that is empowering"Big Data For Dummies" cuts through the confusion and helps you take charge of big data solutions for your organization.

Genres: Business, Technology, Computer Science, Technical, Computers, Reference, Nonfiction

336 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[Johan · Rating 1 out of 5]

I am done with this book, but I haven't finished it. I usually like the "For Dummies"-books. You can read about a topic without prior knowledge, without having studied the topic or without experiences.
The authors of those books assume no prior knowledge
You quickly go to a level where you can talk with others about it.
If you like the subject, you can go and read some more advanced books or enroll in an (online) class. If not, then at least you know what it is about.

I recently started reading two books "Big Data for Dummies" and "Data Science for Dummies" simultaneously.
I had to stop both of them because they expect a lot of prior knowledge: math, programming, machine learning, parallel computing, math, statistics (advanced level), ...
It was useless trying to continue. I stopped, maybe one day I will pick them up again, but only after I have brushed up my math, statistics and programming skills and maybe have read some entry-level or dummy) books about machine learning, ...

Both books may contain a lot of information, but they are no dummy-books. Unless, for the data science book, you consider someone with a bachelor's, master's or PhD in computer sciences or math, but without knowledge of data science a dummy.
In case of the big data book, there is just too much jargon.

[Ben De Bono · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a bit more infrastructure focused than I would have liked - especially since most Big Data implementations are going to be cloud based - but there's lots of good info throughout. My perspective is coming at this as a seasoned RDBMS veteran looking to better understand the mind shift that needs to take place in the Big Data world. This was a helpful piece in that journey

[David Roberts · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book I read to research this post was Big Data For Dummies by Judith Hurwitz et al which is a very good book which I read at http://safaribooksonline.com . Big Data is still in its relative infancy and consists of two types of information, machine generated and human generated. Machine generated might be weather data or sensor data from an aircraft where as human data might be something a person said about your product on facebook or search information on a your website. The biggest problem isn't storing all this information but accessing relavant data hidden amongst it and doing something with the data. At one time companies used databases that had to be written specifically for what they wanted to do. Then came relational databases like Oracle & Microsoft SQL Server. These could be adapted using languages like SQL to do lots of things. Now we are going into another era where most information will be stored either on a hybrid cloud or cloud provider. Companies will have virtual servers where 1 or 2 servers will have to do the job of several servers and their massive hard drives will be partitioned to run several server roles possibly with several operating systems. When people go on the internet the computer will be a virtualized workstation with limited permissions to limit the damage a virus can do. Companies will use big data organisations Amazon Web Services to store huge amounts of data but at a fraction of the cost an equivalent server would cost. There are a lot of open source databases like Hbase & PostGRE where generally they are free to use but in some cases you can buy a technical support package. There are some big players in all this like IBM, SAS & Oracle. You have to shop around for what is best for your requirements. Amazon Web Services are regarded as one of the cheapest and best and are the biggest cloud provider in the world. Of course the hardest part is integrating everything so it works. There are some packages and services which are specific to a particular type of business like SPSS for Psychology Statistics. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book which is on a very interesting subject which as time goes on is going to get more and more important to businesses and organisations.

[Fahim · Rating 5 out of 5]

What do you need to do when you accumulate a petabyte of data is a question that can be easily answered by this book.

Big Data is an easy and interesting read for data lovers. This book starts with the basics of big data and walks you step by step in order to give you a clear understanding of how to handle big data, what technology you should adopt and what advantages can big data bring to your business. This book also provides some clear and up-to-date examples of big data use in the real world.

If you are a novice to big data or somebody who is looking for a source to start learning about this science, you had better try this book. The contents are easy to read and understandable, yet some chapters of the book get technical which is still fun because you will become familiar with new tools and technologies about big data, so it won't hurt to re-read a sentence and take some seconds to soak the contents in the brain.

Gain the knowledge, develop the skill and make your world big with big data!

[Bill Diamond · Rating 4 out of 5]

Slowly reading this on my ipad. Good writing style with illustrations. This is generic to Apache Hadoop. While a "for dummies" series title, it still requires a fair amount of knowledge of enterprise database, network, and systems architecture. Used in combination with IBM's free bigdatauniversity.com, anyone can learn the basics of big data quickly.

[Arwa hawwa · Rating 2 out of 5]

even though it is for dummies I didn't get it !!
مش عارفة المشكلة في و لا في الكتاب ..
but anyway I got some info. that may helps me allah willing !

[Debbie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very dry. I struggled to engage with this. I have read other big data books that have taken my interest more than this one.

[Justin J. · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is not a book for beginners or folks who are even mildly educated in the subject area.

It fails to answer the big obvious question: What can big data do for my company?

It’s 200 pages of details on implementation. But is very thin on why bother.

No named case studies.

I have no idea who the authors thought they were writing this book for but it wasn’t “for dummies”.

Hard pass.

[Ankit Dewan · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book is a clear and mostly non technical rendezvous of the world of hadoop , Map Reduce and the Big Data ecosystems.

Totally loved reading this book.

[Mav Huang · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is a book not for people with no knowledge if big data, but for real dummies. Don’t bother.

[Oxana Udodova · Rating 2 out of 5]

Быстрее будет прочитать страницу в Википедии

[Chee Wai Wong · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not very useful.

[Kasia Piekarz · Rating 3 out of 5]

I suppose it was a decent introduction but too detailed on the database stuff and not enough on the analytics. analytic business examples seemed unrealistic.

[Sergei · Rating 3 out of 5]

Text intensive. It would be much much better work it were more visual rich, rather than text overloaded. The "for dummies" is a misleading part of the title, the underlying big data technologies are far from being simplistic and easy to grasp. Other than that, the book is a great overview of the field, and a good big data myth breaker. As it usually the case with IT, the ideas covered are logical evolution of the digital world.

[Dan Pfeiffer · Rating 3 out of 5]

I recommend this book for anyone who is working in or around Big Data in their company or business and need a referential starting point to the topic. Some of the industry examples of analytics were limited and the book could have benefited from more specific case study examples rather than generalizations.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good overview of Big Data's technical aspect. Readable even for data novices (like myself). Seems to work well with the social media books I have been reading. Need figure out what to read next - guessing around marketing analytic.

[Rachel Bayles · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well-written, a bit repetitive, and (as should be expected) no technical detail. Good introduction, but it's more accurate to say this is a book about how big data is used. Anyone who has even a basic grasp of the topic will not learn anything new.

[André Gomes · Rating 2 out of 5]

Good Introduction about the Big Data World. Recommend for those who are not familiar with the basics.

[Rajnish Kumar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good book to start for Bigdata.

[Hom Sack · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although I understand the concepts, a case study would make them more practical. This is not the book for me.

[Fausto Betances · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good introduction. Some technical descriptions and lots of theoretical real life examples tailored for beginners. Appropriate in title and context.

[Delhi Irc]

Location: GG7 IRC
Accession No: DL027245

[Staszek · Rating 2 out of 5]

Too general a view for a layman like me.

[Alexey Khoryushin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Вторая из трех книг из "Библиотеки Сбербанка", безвозмездно полученных в красивом бумажном издании. Для меня книга оказалась непомерно раздутой, полезной информации немного. Можно порекомендовать пролистать главы 7-14 (из 25), а первые 6 - совсем вводные, после 14й - маркетинговый буллщит.