About the Reviewers

Puneetha B M is a software engineer, data enthusiast, and technical blogger. Her research interests include big data, cloud computing, machine learning, and NoSQL databases. She is also a professional software engineer with more than 2 years of working experience. She holds a master's degree in computer applications from P.E.S. Institute of Technology. Other than programming, she enjoys painting and listening to music. You can learn more from her blog (http://blog.puneethabm.in/) and LinkedIn profile (https://www.linkedin.com/in/puneethabm).

I owe a great deal to Prof. Dr. Ram Rustagi for being a role model in my life and for his zealous inspiration. I would like to thank my brother, Nischith B.M., for supporting me in everything I do. I would also like to thank Packt Publishing and its staff for providing the opportunity to contribute to this book.

Hamzeh Khazaei is a postdoctoral research scientist at IBM Canada Research and Development Centre. He received his PhD degree in computer science from University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada (2009–2012). Earlier, he received both his BSc and MSc degrees in computer science from Amirkabir University of Technology, Tehran, Iran (2000–2008). He is also a sessional instructor in the Computer Science department at Ryerson University (http://scs.ryerson.ca/~hkhazaei). He teaches software engineering to fourth year undergraduate students. His research area includes big data analytics, cloud computing infrastructure, analytics as a service, and modeling of computing systems.

I would like to thank my dear wife for her perpetual support in all my endeavors.

Nitin Pradeep Kumar is a passionate developer with extensive experience and oodles of interest in emerging technologies such as the cloud and mobile. He is currently a cloud quality engineer at Appcelerator, a leading Silicon Valley-based start-up that provides an MBaaS platform purpose-built for mobile and cloud development. Before this stint, he studied at the National University of Singapore toward a master's degree in knowledge engineering, which involves building intelligent systems using cutting-edge artificial intelligence and data-mining techniques. He enjoys the start-up environment and has worked with technologies such as Hadoop, Hive, and data warehousing. He lives in Singapore and spends his spare cycles playing retro PC games on his mobile and learning Muay Thai.

I would like to thank my family, friends, and my wonderful brother, Nivin, for supporting me in all my endeavors.

Balaswamy Vaddeman is a Hadoop hackathon winner for Hyderabad in 2013. He is one of the top contributors on the Hive tag at http://www.stackoverflow.com. He is a big data professional with 3 years of experience. He is well known for training people on big data/Hadoop. So far, he has delivered six big data projects. He is a Java/J2EE expert with 8 years of IT experience and 5 years of RDBMS experience. He is an automation expert on Unix-based systems using Shell scripting. He has experience in setting up teams and bringing them up to speed on big data projects. He is an active participant in Hadoop/big data forums.

I would like to thank my wife, Radha, my son, Pandu, and my daughter, Bubly, for their cooperation in completing this book.