This book was my first exposure to an architecture for dealing with large amounts of data in a holistic way; while I'm familiar with individual concepts like MapReduce, Column Stores, CAP, etc... I've never thought about them all at as part of the same ecosystem. As such, my rating is based on the accessibility and readability of the book, not of the correctness and feasibility of the content.

This is the kind of technology stack my current employer is forming a business around and I want to get started as soon as possible; I was recommended this book by someone who has built these systems before. I managed to read through it in a day and never felt daunted or lost in the text. While there are certainly parts I chose to skim over because I feel I'll be better off examining them in depth while I tackle that particular part of the infrastructure, I feel the overall gist of what this book is enabling me to build was covered in a very understandable way. Even if I don't remember much of the book's particular details, I know when I'll need to revisit them and where I need to look.

To sum it up very briefly (and hoping I'm not messing up), this book spells out a proposed general architecture for processing huge amounts of data (The Lambda Architecture) and covers the five layers it comprises:
1. The data ingestion layer
2. The batch layer (for views that take a long time to process)
3. The serving layer (for serving the information generated by the batch layer)
4. The speed layer (for quickly showing derived information that has been added since the last batch, can also be used for real-time views)
5. The querying layer, to get back specific information.

Along the way it defines data to mean raw information, vs. what information we will derive by views. At each of these layers, the authors go into the things you will have to consider (algorithm choice, anticipated gotchas, the nature of the problems being solved) and use a concrete solution to demonstrate how those problems would be implemented. While particular pieces of software are chosen, they are used to discuss the issues in real-world terms and the book does a good job of not being beholden to particular implementations.

I have never read books by Manning Press before, generally choosing to stick to O'Reilly publications and the occasional Pragmatic Bookshelf if it involves Ruby. This book impressed me greatly, and it's still in the process of being read. I will eagerly look over the rest of Manning's catalogue to see if they reach this level of quality. ( )

The best book on the subject. ( )