Alex Holmes

Alex Holmes is a senior software engineer with extensive expertise in solving big data problems using Hadoop. He has presented at JavaOne and Jazoon and is a technical lead at VeriSign.

books by Alex Holmes

Hadoop in Practice, Second Edition

  • September 2014
  • ISBN 9781617292224
  • 512 pages
  • printed in black & white

It's always a good time to upgrade your Hadoop skills! Hadoop in Practice, Second Edition provides a collection of 104 tested, instantly useful techniques for analyzing real-time streams, moving data securely, machine learning, managing large-scale clusters, and taming big data using Hadoop. This completely revised edition covers changes and new features in Hadoop core, including MapReduce 2 and YARN. You'll pick up hands-on best practices for integrating Spark, Kafka, and Impala with Hadoop, and get new and updated techniques for the latest versions of Flume, Sqoop, and Mahout. In short, this is the most practical, up-to-date coverage of Hadoop available.

Readers need to know a programming language like Java and have basic familiarity with Hadoop.

Hadoop in Practice

  • October 2012
  • ISBN 9781617290237
  • 536 pages
  • printed in black & white

Hadoop in Practice collects 85 battle-tested examples and presents them in a problem/solution format. It balances conceptual foundations with practical recipes for key problem areas like data ingress and egress, serialization, and LZO compression. You'll explore each technique step by step, learning how to build a specific solution along with the thinking that went into it. As a bonus, the book's examples create a well-structured and understandable codebase you can tweak to meet your own needs.