You've heard the hype about Hadoop: it runs petabyte–scale data mining tasks insanely fast, it runs gigantic tasks on clouds for absurdly cheap, it's been heavily committed to by tech giants like IBM, Yahoo!, and the Apache Project, and it's completely open-source (thus free). But what exactly is it, and more importantly, how do you even get a Hadoop cluster up and running?From Apress, the name you've come to trust for hands–on technical knowledge, Pro Hadoop brings you up to speed on Hadoop. You learn the ins and outs of MapReduce; how to structure a cluster, design, and implement the Hadoop file system; and how to build your first cloud–computing tasks using Hadoop. Learn how to let Hadoop take care of distributing and parallelizing your software—you just focus on the code, Hadoop takes care of the rest. Best of all, you'll learn from a tech professional who's been in the Hadoop scene since day one. Written from the perspective of a principal engineer with down–in–the–trenches knowledge of what to do wrong with Hadoop, you learn how to avoid the common, expensive first errors that everyone makes with creating their own Hadoop system or inheriting someone else's. Skip the novice stage and the expensive, hard–to–fix mistakes...go straight to seasoned pro on the hottest cloud–computing framework with Pro Hadoop. Your productivity will blow your managers away.