Planning for Big Data [Kindle Edition]

While at first glance potential readers might see this white paper sized text as overlapping with another recent O'Reilly Radar Team publication, "Big Data Now: Current Perspectives from O'Reilly Radar", this work is really intended to focus on what Big Data is all about, why it matters, and where to get started, whereas the earlier text covered a much broader spectrum of Big Data related material. In addition, while management is part of the target audience for both, the earlier text is also more technical in the sense that it gets down to programmatic levels in a few places, and also discusses technology stacks that this book does not cover.

After a discussion of how a company collects, analyzes, and acts on data, and a walk through different aspects of Big Data, the editors shift the discussion to a very high level overview of the Apache Hadoop ecosystem, followed by a Big Data market survey somewhat akin to what one might find from Gartner that focuses on enterprise software vendor distributions of Hadoop, Big Data cloud platforms, and data markets, and brief entries on the NoSQL movement, data visualization, and O'Reilly Radar Team expections from the Big Data landscape over the coming year.

Readers are gently led through the current Big Data landscape. For example, as the author of the second chapter states, "Big data is data that exceeds the processing capacity of conventional database systems. The data is too big, moves too fast, or doesn't fit the structures of your database architectures. To gain value from this data, you must choose an alternative way to process it. The hot IT buzzword of 2012, big data has become viable as cost-effective approaches have emerged to tame the volume, velocity, and variability of massive data. Within this data lie valuable patterns and information, previously hidden because of the amount of work required to extract them."

Although this book contains different material than "Big Data Now: Current Perspectives from O'Reilly Radar", as a consultant I think technical audiences new to this space will prefer this earlier work. In addition, it is rather apparent that "Planning for Big Data: A CIO's Handbook to the Changing Data Landscape" emphasizes commericalized open source products, and does not cover tooling outside of the Hadoop ecosystem to any great extent. While this book is 25% shorter, and is understandably targeted at senior management, many potential readers will likely appreciate the more extensive coverage of this space in the earlier text.

I do a lot of work in IT operations, business analysis, and HR consulting. The past year or so, I've seen a rapid increase in data science jobs and general excitement around big data. A couple weeks ago, the American Psychological Association ran a story about firms hiring business psychologists to join data science teams. So this seems to be a hot area and the "hype" represents not a temporary blip but a genuine trend that will continue to strengthen.

What I like about this book is the ease of reading it. I have not done any work with big data but I understood everything I read. The book covers all the major companies offering services for data scientists and administrators of systems that process big data. I feel current with my knowledge since the book was written in 2011-2012 from what I can tell.

Overall, I'd say the impressive thing about this book is the quality writing and the authors' collective ability to engage a reader who is not working in big data yet, but wants to.

Is an excellent read for initiation into the big-wide emerging world of Big-Data.
Brief but at the same time enticing the reader to plunge in.