Frampton Mike - Mastering Apache Spark: gain expertise in processing and storing data by using advanced techniques with Apache Spark

Mike Frampton is an IT contractor, blogger, and IT author with a keen interest in new technology and big data. He has worked in the IT industry since 1990 in a range of roles (tester, developer, support, and author). He has also worked in many other sectors (energy, banking, telecoms, and insurance). He now lives by the beach in Paraparaumu, New Zealand, with his wife and teenage son. Being married to a Thai national, he divides his time between Paraparaumu and their house in Roi Et, Thailand, between writing and IT consulting. He is always keen to hear about new ideas and technologies in the areas of big data, AI, IT and hardware, so look him up on LinkedIn (http://linkedin.com/profile/view?id=73219349) or his website (http://www.semtech-solutions.co.nz/#!/pageHome) to ask questions or just to say hi.

I would like to acknowledge the efforts of the open source development community who offer their time, expertise and services in order to help develop projects like Apache Spark. I have been continuously impressed by the speed with which this development takes place, which seems to exceed commercial projects. I would also like to mention the communities that grow around open source products, and people who answer technical questions and make books like this possible.

There are too many people that have helped me technically with this book and I would like to mention a few. I would like to thank Michal Malohlava at http://h2o.ai/ for helping me with H2O, and Arsalan Tavakoli-Shiraji at https://databricks.com/ for answering my many questions. I would also like to thank Kenny Bastani for allowing me to use his Mazerunner product.

Riddhi Tuljapurkar, at Packt, and the book reviewers have put in a sterling effort to help push this book along. Finally, I would like to thank my family who have allowed me the time develop this book through the months of 2015.

Andrea Mostosi is a technology enthusiast. Innovation lover since when he was a child, he started his professional job in the early 2000s, and has worked on several projects playing almost every role in the computer science environment. He is currently the CTO at The Fool, a company that tries to make sense of data. During his free time, he likes travelling, running, cooking, biking, reading, observing the sky, and coding.

I would like to thank my wonderful girlfriend Khadija, who lovingly supports me in everything I do. I would also thank my geek friends: Simone M, Daniele V, Luca T, Luigi P, Michele N, Luca O, Luca B, Diego C, and Fabio B. They are the smartest people I know, and comparing myself with them has always pushed me to be better.

Toni Verbeiren received his PhD in theoretical physics in 2003. He has worked on models of artificial neural networks, entailing mathematics, statistics, simulations, (lots of) data, and numerical computations. Since then, he has been active in this industry in a range of domains and roles: infrastructure management and deployment, service and IT management, and ICT/business alignment and enterprise architecture. Around 2010, he started picking up his earlier passion, which is now called Data Science. The combination of data and common sense can be a very powerful basis for making decisions and analyzing risk.