Ideal for software engineers, data engineers, developers, and system administrators working with large-scale data applications, this book describes techniques that can reduce data infrastructure costs and developer hours. Not only will you gain a more comprehensive understanding of Spark, you'll also learn how to make it sing.

With this book, you'll explore:
* How Spark SQL's new interfaces improve performance over SQL's RDD data structure
* The choice between data joins in Core Spark and Spark SQL
* Techniques for getting the most out of standard RDD transformations
* How to work around performance issues in Spark's key/value pair paradigm
* Writing high-performance Spark code without Scala or the JVM
* How to test for functionality and performance when applying suggested improvements
* Using Spark MLlib and Spark ML machine learning libraries
* Spark's Streaming components and external community packages