Who This Book Is For
We designed this book mainly for data scientists and data engineers looking to use Apache Spark. The two roles have slightly different needs, but in reality, most application development covers a bit of both, so we think the material will be useful in both cases. Specifically, in our minds, the data scientist workload focuses more on interactively querying data to answer questions and build statistical models, while the data engineer job focuses on writing maintainable, repeatable production applications-either to use the data scientist’s models in practice, or just to prepare data for further analysis (e.g., building a data ingest pipeline). However, we often see with Spark that these roles blur. For instance, data scientists are able to package production applications without too much hassle and data engineers use interactive analysis to understand and inspect their data to build and maintain pipelines.
While we tried to provide everything data scientists and engineers need to get started, there are some things we didn’t have space to focus on in this book. First, this book does not include in-depth introductions to some of the analytics techniques you can use in Apache Spark, such as machine learning. Instead, we show you how to invoke these techniques using libraries in Spark, assuming you already have a basic background in machine learning. Many full, standalone books exist to cover these techniques in formal detail, so we recommend starting with those if you want to learn about these areas. Second, this book focuses more on application development than on operations and administration (e.g., how to manage an Apache Spark cluster with dozens of users). Nonetheless, we have tried to include comprehensive material on monitoring, debugging, and configuration in Parts V and VI of the book to help engineers get their application running efficiently and tackle day-to-day maintenance. Finally, this book places less emphasis on the older, lower-level APIs in Spark-specifically RDDs and DStreams-to introduce most of the concepts using the newer, higher-level structured APIs. Thus, the book may not be the best fit if you need to maintain an old RDD or DStream application, but should be a great introduction to writing new applications.
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