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This is not a technical question, but want to have suggestions from more experienced people regarding my career. I have been working as UNIX admin from past 13 years, majority of Solaris and couple of years on Linux. Now, I want to learn something more which can excel my career. I have been hearing a lot about Hadoop/Big Data from quite sometime. I do not have any programming or scripting knowledge, neither have knowledge of apache or any database. - I am assuming that there are two different job profile, Developer and Admin. Am I understanding it correctly ? - Do I need to learn apache, database, java to learn Hadoop (Even for Admin job profile) ? - At my place training is expensive. if I want to start study with books, which book should I start with ? I can see popular ones are "Hadoop: The Definite Guide - O'Reilly" and also "Big Data for Dummies". (I am asking from beginners level).

Please help with my doubts. Your suggestions will help me to take decision.

user3183426
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    This question appears to be off-topic because it is about not something technical or programming. – Dave Newton Jan 10 '14 at 21:07
  • I would take a look at the O'Reilly book for sure. Also look at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13291569/books-to-start-learning-big-data – mbecker73 Jan 10 '14 at 21:10

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(Moved from comment because too long.)

In order to administer Hadoop in any meaningful way you need to know a fair bit about (a) how Hadoop works, (b) how Hadoop runs its jobs, and (c) job-specific tuning.

I don't know what "learning Apache" means; Apache is a conglomerate of projects, unless you mean the web server itself.

"Learning databases" is too broad to be useful, and Hadoop isn't a database (HBase is).

You don't need any Java knowledge to administer a Java-based program, although knowing about JVM options, how to specify them, and generalities is certainly helpful.

There is a lot to digest, I would start very small, e.g., intro books. Also, keep in mind that there are other solutions besides Hadoop, and a lot of different ways to actually use Hadoop.

The Kiji project is a good way to get Hadoop/HBase/etc up and running, though if you're interested in doing everything "from scratch", it's not the best path.

Dave Newton
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  • Thanks Dave for replying, yes, I would like to go from scratch. When I say "learning apache", I said so because I was going through few links and it says some like, we should have some apache knowledge. Same thing with Database as well. I was looking for guidance, if I should start reading books on Hadoop first, or something else. – user3183426 Jan 10 '14 at 22:15