Grasp Big Data: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) Crafted By Dawn E. Holmes Classified In Brochure

As an introduction to subjects this series of book sis excellent, If you're not familiar with the Oxford Press series of very short introductions to many topics, the Big Data book by Professor Holmes at U Cal, Santa Barbara packs a lot of information into a relatively short bookpages in paperback.
The book is well written, but as always in this series, there's a lot of information in the book so your attention to the material will be required.
Who's the audience You can't read many articles without encountering the term big data so if you're intellectually curious about what that term means, then the book will provide the necessary information.
If you're a student or you have a student in your house who expresses interest

in learning about data science, then this would be a good introduction to the area.
If you're in business and you've heard about other businesses incorporating big data into their business model and you think that you might like to do so as well, then make the commitment to read the book.
It won't take long to read it, you'll come away with an overview of the subject, and maybe you'll have some thoughts about how big data might be useful in your business.
What does the book contain First, the author looks defines data and briefly looks at how data has been used for thousands of years.
In chapterof the book the author defines big data and looks at some of its special characteristics.
The author looks at how big data is employed in detecting credit card fraud, Clustering data plays a role here the author explains how, Chapterexplains how data is stored, Hadoop, a spftware fpr a distributed file system, plays an important role in storing data, Structured and unstructured data are described and characterized, SQL and NoSQL databases are described and simple examples are included for these databases, I especially enjoyed the author's description of how data is compressed, I didn't know that data can be compressed with no loss of information lossless data compression and it can be compressed with some loss of information lossy data compression.
The book describes when each type of compression is used, Examples of big data analytics for MapReduce and, to a lesser extent, Google's PageRank are given, The author uses simple examples, and these helped me get a better idea for what was actually going on in the analytical process.
The actual process is much complex, The book describes the use of big data in medicine and business, In the chapter on medicine the book describes why Googles' effort to predict flu trends was largely unsuccessful.
This chapter helps to explain some of the limitations of big data, In some areas even Google has decided that a small sample size delivers the information necessary to make a sufficiently informed decision.
E commerce, recommender systems, targeted advertising and pay per click advertising are described in the book, How uses big data finds its place in the book as well, If you have an interest in any of these topics, I recommend the book highly, Some of the examples in the book, while simply, required me to consider them carefully, but I thought the effort was worthwhile.
You may find the effort worthwhile as well, Book covers big data concepts clearly and in simple language for those new to the area, It really is a very short introduction, I would guess that non IT could find it interesting, However if you are a programmer, you wont learn anything new or interesting Since long before computers were even thought of, data has been collected and organized by diverse cultures across the world.
Once access to the Internet became a reality for large swathes of the worlds population, the amount of data generated each day became huge, and continues to grow exponentially.
It includes all our uploaded documents, video, and photos, all our social media traffic, our online shopping, even the GPS data from our cars.


Big Data represents a qualitative change, not simply a quantitative one, The term refers both to the new technologies involved, and to the way it can be used by business and government.
Dawn E. Holmes uses a variety of case studies to explain how data is stored, analysed, and exploited by a variety of bodies from big companies to organizations concerned with disease control.
Big data is transforming the way businesses operate, and the way medical research can be carried out, At the same
time, it raises important ethical issues Holmes discusses cases such as the Snowden affair, data security, and domestic smart devices which can be hijacked by hackers.



ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area.
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