The 16 Best Apache Spark Books on Our Reading List for 2023

Source: Databricks

Our editors have compiled this directory of the best Apache Spark books based on Amazon user reviews, rating, and ability to add business value.

There are loads of free resources available online (such as Solutions Review’s Data Analytics and Business Intelligence Software Buyer’s Guide, Visual Comparison Matrix, and best practices section) and those are great, but sometimes it’s best to do things the old fashioned way. There are few resources that can match the in-depth, comprehensive detail of one of the best data Apache Spark books.

The editors at Solutions Review have done much of the work for you, curating this directory of the best Apache Spark books on Amazon. Titles have been selected based on the total number and quality of reader user reviews and ability to add business value. Each of the books listed in this compilation have met a minimum criteria of 5 reviews and a 4-star-or-better ranking.

Below you will find a library of titles from recognized industry analysts, experienced practitioners, and subject matter experts spanning the depths of big data processing all the way to machine learning algorithms. This compilation includes publications for practitioners of all skill levels.

The Best Apache Spark Books

Spark: The Definitive Guide: Big Data Processing Made Simple

“Learn how to use, deploy, and maintain Apache Spark with this comprehensive guide, written by the creators of the open-source cluster-computing framework. With an emphasis on improvements and new features in Spark 2.0, authors Bill Chambers and Matei Zaharia break down Spark topics into distinct sections, each with unique goals. You’ll explore the basic operations and common functions of Spark’s structured APIs, as well as Structured Streaming, a new high-level API for building end-to-end streaming applications.”

Learning Spark: Lightning-Fast Big Data Analysis

“Updated to include Spark 3.0, this second edition shows data engineers and data scientists why structure and unification in Spark matters. Specifically, this book explains how to perform simple and complex data analytics and employ machine learning algorithms. Through step-by-step walk-throughs, code snippets, and notebooks, you’ll be able to learn Python, SQL, Scala, or Java high-level structured APIs and understand Spark operations and SQL Engine, as well as inspect, tune, and debug Spark operations with Spark configurations and Spark UI.”

Spark in Action: Covers Apache Spark 3 with Examples in Java, Python, and Scala

“The Spark distributed data processing platform provides an easy-to-implement tool for ingesting, streaming, and processing data from any source. In Spark in Action, you’ll learn to take advantage of Spark’s core features and incredible processing speed, with applications including real-time computation, delayed evaluation, and machine learning. Spark skills are a hot commodity in enterprises worldwide, and with Spark’s powerful and flexible Java APIs, you can reap all the benefits without first learning Scala or Hadoop.”

High Performance Spark: Best Practices for Scaling and Optimizing Apache Spark

“Apache Spark is amazing when everything clicks. But if you haven’t seen the performance improvements you expected, or still don’t feel confident enough to use Spark in production, this practical book is for you. Authors Holden Karau and Rachel Warren demonstrate performance optimizations to help your Spark queries run faster and handle larger data sizes, while using fewer resources. Ideal for software engineers, data engineers, developers, and system administrators working with large-scale data applications, this book describes techniques.”

Apache Spark in 24 Hours, Sams Teach Yourself

“This book’s straightforward, step-by-step approach shows you how to deploy, program, optimize, manage, integrate, and extend Spark–now, and for years to come. You’ll discover how to create powerful solutions encompassing cloud computing, real-time stream processing, machine learning, and more. Every lesson builds on what you’ve already learned, giving you a rock-solid foundation for real-world success. Whether you are a data analyst, data engineer, data scientist, or data steward, learning Spark will help you to advance your career.”

Frank Kane’s Taming Big Data with Apache Spark and Python

“Frank Kane’s Taming Big Data with Apache Spark and Python is your companion to learning Apache Spark in a hands-on manner. Frank will start you off by teaching you how to set up Spark on a single system or on a cluster, and you’ll soon move on to analyzing large data sets using Spark RDD, and developing and running effective Spark jobs quickly using Python. Frank has packed this book with over 15 interactive, fun-filled examples relevant to the real world, and he will empower you to understand the Spark ecosystem.”

Graph Algorithms: Practical Examples in Apache Spark and Neo4j

“Learn how graph algorithms can help you leverage relationships within your data to develop intelligent solutions and enhance your machine learning models. With this practical guide, developers and data scientists will discover how graph analytics deliver value, whether they’re used for building dynamic network models or forecasting real-world behavior. Mark Needham and Amy Hodler from Neo4j explain how graph algorithms describe complex structures and reveal difficult-to-find patterns.”

Practical Data Science with Hadoop and Spark: Designing and Building Effective Analytics at Scale

“Practical Data Science with Hadoop and Spark is your complete guide to doing just that. Drawing on immense experience with Hadoop and big data, three leading experts bring together everything you need: high-level concepts, deep-dive techniques, real-world use cases, practical applications, and hands-on tutorials. The authors introduce the essentials of data science and the modern Hadoop ecosystem, explaining how Hadoop and Spark have evolved into an effective platform for solving data science problems at scale.”

Advanced Analytics with Spark: Patterns for Learning from Data at Scale

“In the second edition of this practical book, four Cloudera data scientists present a set of self-contained patterns for performing large-scale data analysis with Spark. The authors bring Spark, statistical methods, and real-world data sets together to teach you how to approach analytics problems by example. Updated for Spark 2.1, this edition acts as an introduction to these techniques and other best practices in Spark programming. You’ll start with an introduction to Spark and its ecosystem, and then dive into patterns that apply common techniques.”

Mastering Machine Learning on AWS: Advanced machine learning in Python using SageMaker, Apache Spark, and TensorFlow

“As you go through the chapters, you’ll gain insights into how these algorithms can be trained, tuned and deployed in AWS using Apache Spark on Elastic Map Reduce (EMR), SageMaker, and TensorFlow. While you focus on algorithms such as XGBoost, linear models, factorization machines, and deep nets, the book will also provide you with an overview of AWS as well as detailed practical applications that will help you solve real-world problems. Every practical application includes a series of companion notebooks with all the necessary code to run on AWS.”

Mastering Spark with R: The Complete Guide to Large-Scale Analysis and Modeling

“If you’re like most R users, you have deep knowledge and love for statistics. But as your organization continues to collect huge amounts of data, adding tools such as Apache Spark makes a lot of sense. With this practical book, data scientists and professionals working with large-scale data applications will learn how to use Spark from R to tackle big data and big compute problems. Authors Javier Luraschi, Kevin Kuo, and Edgar Ruiz show you how to use R with Spark to solve different data analysis problems.”

Stream Processing with Apache Spark: Mastering Structured Streaming and Spark Streaming

“Before you can build analytics tools to gain quick insights, you first need to know how to process data in real time. With this practical guide, developers familiar with Apache Spark will learn how to put this in-memory framework to use for streaming data. You’ll discover how Spark enables you to write streaming jobs in almost the same way you write batch jobs. Authors Gerard Maas and François Garillot help you explore the theoretical underpinnings of Apache Spark.”

Data Analytics with Spark Using Python

“In this guide, big data expert Jeffrey Aven covers all you need to know to leverage Spark, together with its extensions, subprojects, and wider ecosystem. Aven combines a language-agnostic introduction to foundational Spark concepts with extensive programming examples utilizing the popular and intuitive PySpark development environment. This guide’s focus on Python makes it widely accessible to large audiences of data professionals, analysts, and developers―even those with little Hadoop or Spark experience.”

Scala Programming for Big Data Analytics: Get Started With Big Data Analytics Using Apache Spark

“Gain the key language concepts and programming techniques of Scala in the context of big data analytics and Apache Spark. The book begins by introducing you to Scala and establishes a firm contextual understanding of why you should learn this language, how it stands in comparison to Java, and how Scala is related to Apache Spark for big data analytics. Next, you’ll set up the Scala environment ready for examining your first Scala programs. This is followed by sections on Scala fundamentals like mutable and immutable variables.”

Practical Big Data Analytics: Hands-on techniques to implement enterprise analytics and machine learning using Hadoop, Spark, NoSQL and R

“With the help of this guide, you will be able to bridge the gap between the theoretical world of technology with the practical ground reality of building corporate Big Data and data science platforms. You will get hands-on exposure to Hadoop and Spark, build machine learning dashboards using R and R Shiny, create web-based apps using NoSQL databases such as MongoDB and even learn how to write R code for neural networks. By the end of the book, you will have a very clear and concrete understanding of what big data analytics means.”

Expert Hadoop Administration: Managing, Tuning, and Securing Spark, YARN, and HDFS

“In Expert Hadoop Administration, leading Hadoop administrator Sam R. Alapati brings together authoritative knowledge for creating, configuring, securing, managing, and optimizing production Hadoop clusters in any environment. Drawing on his experience with large-scale Hadoop administration, Alapati integrates action-oriented advice with carefully researched explanations of both problems and solutions. He covers an unmatched range of topics and offers an unparalleled collection of realistic examples.”

NOW READ: The Best Apache Spark Courses and Online Training

Solutions Review participates in affiliate programs. We may make a small commission from products purchased through this resource.