MapReduce Design Patterns Donald Miner and Adam Shook

Summary: Not an easy go

I admit, this was not a good idea to start MapReduce adventure by jumping directly into Design Patterns. However, I had my goal in it. Long, long time ago in a C++ galaxy far away there was a design patterns related book: “Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software”. And it was good.

“MapReduce Design Patters” tries to be something similar within MapReduce area. However, this book focuses on the implementation too much. If you are not familiar with MapReduced yet, it will not help you becoming fascinated about the whole idea. After reading dozen of pages I had to start from the scratch by looking for some additional MapReduce introductions before I have gotten back to this one.

It’s really hard for me to judge the technical side of the book. This is entirely my fault as I am completely new to MapReduce. Yes, I know, it was like
jumping in at the deep end. However, I was hoping that design patterns will be presented in more general way, more the way design patterns were presented in already mentioned “Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software”. My point is. I don’t claim that MapReduce Design Patterns is written badly. No, not at all. On the other hand, if you’d like to become more familiar with the general idea of MapReduce, this is not a good place to start.

Big plus goes to the authors for collecting various patterns and indexing them in a one place.

And one more explanation. This book is not designed for the complete beginners like me myself. Authors themselves say: “The motivation for us to write this book was to fill a missing gap we saw in a lot of new MapReduce developers. They had learned how to use the system, got comfortable with writing MapReduce, but were lacking the experience to understand how to do things right or well”.

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