HI there!
Welcome to Hadoop Illuminated. This book is brought to you by two authors -- Mark Kerzner and Sujee Maniyam. Both of us have been working in Hadoop ecosystem for a number of years. We have implemented Hadoop solutions and taught training courses in Hadoop. We both benefited from Hadoop and the open source community tremendously. So when we thought about writing a book on Hadoop, we choose to do it in the fully open source way! It is a minuscule token of thanks from both of us to the Hadoop community.

Mark Kerzner is an experienced/hands-on Big Data architect. He has been developing software for over 20 years in a variety of technologies (enterprise, web, HPC) and for a variety of verticals (Oil and Gas, legal, trading). He currently focuses on Hadoop, Big Data, NoSQL and Amazon Cloud Services. His clients include Bay Area startups, T-Mobile, GHX, Cision, and lately Intel, where he created and delivered Big Data training.

Mark stays active in the Hadoop / Startup communities. He runs the Houston Hadoop Meetup, where he presents and often trains. Mark’s company SHMsoft has won multiple innovation awards, and is a client of Houston Incubator HTC, where Mark is involved with many startup initiatives.

Mark contributes to a number of Hadoop-based projects, and his open source projects can be found on GitHub. He writes about Hadoop and other technologies in his blog.

Mark does Hadoop training for individuals and corporations; his classes are hands-on and draw heavily on his industry experience.

Links:
LinkedIn || GitHub || Personal blog || Twitter

Sujee Maniyam is an experienced/hands-on Big Data architect. He has been developing software for the past 12 years in a variety of technologies (enterprise, web and mobile). He currently focuses on Hadoop, Big Data and NoSQL, and Amazon Cloud Services. His clients include early stage startups and enterprise companies.

Sujee stays active in the Hadoop / Open Source community. He runs a developer focused Meetup called 'Big Data Gurus'. He has also presented at a variety of Meetups.

Sujee contributes to Hadoop projects and his open source projects can be found on GitHub. He writes about Hadoop and other technologies on his website

Sujee does Hadoop training for individuals and corporations; his classes are hands-on and draw heavily on his industry experience.

Links:
LinkedIn || GitHub || Tech writings || Tech talks || BigDataGuru meetup

The delightful artwork appearing in this book was created by Rebecca Kerzner. She is seventeen and studies at Beren Academy in Houston, TX. She has attended the Glassell school of art for many summers. Her collection of artwork can be seen here.

Rebecca started working on Hadoop illustrations two years ago, when she was fifteen. It is interesting to follow her artistic progress. For example, the first version of the "Hadoop Zoo" can be found here. Note the programmer's kids who "came to see the Hadoop Zoo" are all pretty young. But as the artist grew, so also did her heroes, and in the current version of the same sketch you can see the same characters, but older, perhaps around seventeen years of age. Even the Hadoop elephant appears more mature and serious.

All of Rebecca's Hadoop artwork can be viewed here.

We would like to thank the following people who helped us improve this book.