Hadoop: The Definitive Guide

3 thoughts on “Hadoop: The Definitive Guide”

1. 125 of 141 people found the following review helpful

   
   Useless as a Tutorial, September 19, 2012

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   Frustrated Hadoop Learner –

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   This review is from: Hadoop: The Definitive Guide (Paperback)

   I bought this book as a very experienced programmer but no prior experience with Hadoop, which I need to come up to speed on for a new project. I am extremely disappointed in the book and feel I wasted my money. If there’s one thing you want from a book on a new technology, it’s the ability to get a basic “Hello World” equivalent program running, from which you can then start iterating. This book completely falls down on this most basic requirement – when you get to the very first example program in the book, it tells you that you need to first compile a bunch of example code from the book’s website. That shouldn’t be required, but ok, whatever. Then when you go to the book’s website, you are told that you first need to install a bunch of extra stuff covered later in the book before you can compile the libraries apparently needed to get anything at all to run. This really makes no sense at all – there’s no way I should be having to read all the later chapters to figure out what these things are in order to get my very first example program running. Tossed it into the trash and off in search of a resource done by someone who understands how to structure a tutorial properly.

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2. 43 of 47 people found the following review helpful

   
   Fell short of my expectations. Source of much frustration., August 25, 2012

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   Mark –

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   This review is from: Hadoop: The Definitive Guide (Paperback)

   I had read all the positive reviews and really had high hopes for the book, waited for the 3rd edition thinking it would be current, but I’ve mainly felt frustration in reading it once past the first few chapters.

   Reference to the Bible in other reviews are apt. The book is a mishmash of chapters with a wide variety of styles and intents. The writing giving the overview is great. But other chapters are a reference manual dump with little motivation. Other chapters tried to be guided tutorial, but lacked in important details (or were out dated by changes). Wish it could have been written with a clearer editorial point of view, or better organized in sections with similar purposes.

   Keeping up with a such a fast moving project with a paperback book is no doubt a difficult task. I didn’t feel the book did a good job of dealing with the changes that happened with the shift to 1.x .

   Most frustrating were the mentions of the “book’s website” as a source of up-to-date information. Which website? (hadoopbook.com, oreilly.com, github.com). Wouldn’t it make sense to use a URL instead of the phrase “book’s website?”

   Minor complaint, don’t like the code listings without filenames.

   Expect to find a lot of time looking for stuff on the web that should have been included in the book or at least documented with a concrete URLs.

   There are certainly example of truly fine technical writing in the book. Just wish that level could have been maintained through out the book.

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3. 34 of 39 people found the following review helpful

   
   poorly organized and hard to get examples working, October 12, 2012

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   Y. Yuan (CA, USA) –

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   This review is from: Hadoop: The Definitive Guide (Paperback)

   I purchased this book a few months ago based on many earlier 5-star reviews. I had high hopes that it would be as good as those reviewers highly praised. However, the book is actually unbelievably poorly organized – essentially written in a spaghetti fashion. Yes – it contains a lot of information about Hadoop, but with three basic issues: 1) examples are trivial and hard to get working due to insufficient, unclear or no procedures; 2) many subjects (e.g. streaming) are spread over several chapters and readers have to stitch them together after reading all relevant chapters; and 3) many stataments are either inaccurate or lack supportive data. Ironically, one has to apply MapReduce to all the subjects in order to sort out various subjects in a more logic order. I look forward to the 4th edition with significant quality improvement.

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