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Online Course

Introduction to Apache Spark

University of California, Berkeley via edX

Found in Big Data, Data Science

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Provider edX
Cost Free Online Course (Audit)
Session Finished
Language English
Effort 5-10 hours a week
Start Date
Duration 2 weeks long
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Overview

Spark is rapidly becoming the compute engine of choice for big data. Spark programs are more concise and often run 10-100 times faster than Hadoop MapReduce jobs. As companies realize this, Spark developers are becoming increasingly valued.

This statistics and data analysis course will teach you the basics of working with Spark and will provide you with the necessary foundation for diving deeper into Spark. You’ll learn about Spark’s architecture and programming model, including commonly used APIs. After completing this course, you’ll be able to write and debug basic Spark applications. This course will also explain how to use Spark’s web user interface (UI), how to recognize common coding errors, and how to proactively prevent errors. The focus of this course will be Spark Core and Spark SQL.

This course covers advanced undergraduate-level material. It requires a programming background and experience with Python (or the ability to learn it quickly). All exercises will use PySpark (the Python API for Spark), but previous experience with Spark or distributed computing is NOT required. Students should take this Python mini-quiz before the course and take this Python mini-course if they need to learn Python or refresh their Python knowledge.

Taught by

Anthony D. Joseph and Jon Bates

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Reviews for edX's Introduction to Apache Spark Based on 9 reviews

5 star 11%
4 stars 44%
3 stars 33%
2 star 11%
1 star 0%

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Caio T

by Caio is taking this course right now, spending 3 hours a week on it and found the course difficulty to be very easy.

More of a paid tutorial than an actual course. It's ok to say that the Spark approach is better than the alternatives, but it's just too much.

Other than that, the actual contents of the lectures are ok (although shallow), but quizzes are terrible and utterly irrelevant. They are there to make sure you paid attention to the videos and nothing else.

Setting up the development environment is overly complicated and probably the most challenging aspect of the class, which is frustrating. Didn't reach the point to get hands-on with Spark, since the notebook labs are very verbose and have everything, except code.

For now, I'll stick to tutorials on the web and the documentation, they seem to be the more promising than this course.

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