Apache Spark Hands on Specialization for Big Data Analytics (Udemy.com)

What if you could catapult your career in one of the most lucrative domains i.e. Big Data by learning the state of the art Hadoop technology (Apache Spark) which is considered mandatory in all of the current jobs in this industry?

What if you could develop your skill-set in one of the most hottest Big Data technology i.e. Apache Spark by learning in one of the most comprehensive course  out there (with 10+ hours of content) packed with dozens of hands-on real world examples, use-cases, challenges and best-practices?

What if you could learn from an instructor who is working in the world's largest consultancy firm, has worked, end-to-end, in Australia's biggest Big Data projects to date and who has a proven track record on Udemy with highly positive reviews and thousands of students already enrolled in his previous course(s)?

If you have such aspirations and goals, then this course and you is a perfect match made in heaven!

Why Apache Spark?

Apache Spark has revolutionised and disrupted the way big data processing and machine learning were done by virtue of its unprecedented in-memory and optimised computational model. It has been unanimously hailed as the future of Big Data. It's the tool of choice all around the world which allows data scientists, engineers and developers to acquire and process data for a number of use-cases like scalable machine learning, stream processing and graph analytics to name a few. All of the leading organisations like Amazon, Ebay, Yahoo among many others have embraced this technology to address their Big Data processing requirements. 

Additionally, Gartner has repeatedly highlighted Apache Spark as a leader in Data Science platforms. Certification programs of Hadoop vendors like Cloudera and Hortonworks, which have high esteem in current industry, have oriented their curriculum to focus heavily on Apache Spark. Almost all of the jobs in Big Data and Machine Learning space demand proficiency in Apache Spark. 

This is what John Tripier, Alliances and Ecosystem Lead at Databricks has to say, “The adoption of Apache Spark by businesses large and small is growing at an incredible rate across a wide range of industries, and the demand for developers with certified expertise is quickly following suit”.

All of these facts correlate to the notion that learning this amazing technology will give you a strong competitive edge in your career.

Why this course?

Firstly, this is the most comprehensive and in-depth course ever produced on Apache Spark. I've carefully and critically surveyed all of the resources out there and almost all of them fail to cover this technology in the depth that it truly deserves. Some of them lack coverage of Apache Spark's theoretical concepts like its architecture and how it works in conjunction with Hadoop, some fall short in thoroughly describing how to use Apache Spark APIs optimally for complex big data problems, some ignore the hands-on aspects to demonstrate how to do Apache Spark programming to work on real-world use-cases and almost all of them don't cover the best practices in industry and the mistakes that many professionals make in field.

This course addresses all of the limitations that's prevalent in the currently available courses. Apart from that, as I have attended trainings from leading Big Data vendors like Cloudera (for which they charge thousands of dollars), I've ensured that the course is aligned with the educational patterns and best practices followed in those training to ensure that you get the best and most effective learning experience. 

Each section of the course covers concepts in extensive detail and from scratch so that you won't find any challenges in learning even if you are new to this domain. Also, each section will have an accompanying assignment section where we will work together on a number of real-world challenges and use-cases employing real-world data-sets. The data-sets themselves will also belong to different niches ranging from retail, web server logs, telecommunication and some of them will also be from Kaggle (world's leading Data Science competition platform).

The course leverages Scala instead of Python. Even though wherever possible, reference to Python development is also given but the course is majorly based on Scala. The decision was made based on a number of rational factors. Scala is the de-facto language for development in Apache Spark. Apache Spark itself is developed in Scala and as a result all of the new features are initially made available in Scala and then in other languages like Python. Additionally, there is significant performance difference when it comes to using Apache Spark with Scala compared to Python. Scala itself is one of the most highest paid programming languages and you will be developing strong skill in that language along the way as well.

The course also has a number of quizzes to further test your skills. For further support, you can always ask questions to which you will get prompt response. I will also be sharing best practices and tips on regular basis with my students.

What you are going to learn in this course?

The course consists of majorly two sections:

• Section - 1:

We'll start off with the introduction of Apache Spark and will understand its potential and business use-cases in the context of overall Hadoop ecosystem. We'll then focus on how Apache Spark actually works and will take a deep dive of the architectural components of Spark as its crucial for thorough understanding.

• Section  - 2:

After developing understanding of Spark architecture, we will move to the next section of this course where we will employ Scala language to use Apache Spark APIs to develop distributed computation programs. Please note that you don't need to have prior knowledge of Scala for this course as I will start with the very basics of Scala and as a result you will also be developing your skills in this one of the highest paying programming languages.

In this section, We will comprehensively understand how spark performs distributed computation using abstractions like RDDs, what are the caveats in loading data in Apache Spark, what are the different ways to create RDDs and how to leverage parallelism and much more.