ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
xvi
Chris Wensel was the first one to show me that processing data at scale could be elegant
and performant. His Cascading library changed the way I looked at Big Data processing.
None of my work would have been possible without the pioneers of the Big Data field.
Special thanks to Jeffrey Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat for the original MapReduce paper,
Giuseppe DeCandia, Deniz Hastorun, Madan Jampani, Gunavardhan Kakulapati,
Avinash Lakshman, Alex Pilchin, Swaminathan Sivasubramanian, Peter Vosshall and
Werner Vogels for the original Dynamo paper, and Michael Cafarella and Doug Cutting
for founding the Apache Hadoop project.
Rich Hickey has been one of my biggest inspirations during my programming
career. Clojure is the best language I have ever used, and I’ve become a better pro-
grammer having learned it. I appreciate its practicality and focus on simplicity. Rich’s
philosophy on state and complexity in programming has influenced me deeply.
When I started writing this book, I was not nearly the writer I am now. Renae Gre-
goire, one of my development editors at Manning, deserves special thanks for helping
me improve as a writer. She drilled into me the importance of using examples to lead
into general concepts, and she set off many light bulbs for me on how to effectively
structure technical writing. The skills she taught me apply not only to writing techni-
cal books, but to blogging, giving talks, and communication in general. For gaining an
important life skill, I am forever grateful.
This book would not be nearly of the same quality without the efforts of my co-
author James Warren. He did a phenomenal job absorbing the theoretical concepts
and finding even better ways to present the material. Much of the clarity of the book
comes from his great communication skills.
My publisher, Manning, was a pleasure to work with. They were patient with me
and understood that finding the right way to write on such a big topic takes time.
Through the whole process they were supportive and helpful, and they always gave me
the resources I needed to be successful. Thanks to Marjan Bace and Michael Stephens
for all the support, and to all the other staff for their help and guidance along the way.
I try to learn as much as possible about writing from studying other writers. Brad-
ford Cross, Clayton Christensen, Paul Graham, Carl Sagan, and Derek Sivers have
been particularly influential.
Finally, I can’t give enough thanks to the hundreds of people who reviewed, com-
mented, and gave feedback on our book as it was being written. That feedback led us
to revise, rewrite, and restructure numerous times until we found ways to present the
material effectively. Special thanks to Aaron Colcord, Aaron Crow, Alex Holmes, Arun
Jacob, Asif Jan, Ayon Sinha, Bill Graham, Charles Brophy, David Beckwith, Derrick
Burns, Douglas Duncan, Hugo Garza, Jason Courcoux, Jonathan Esterhazy, Karl
Kuntz, Kevin Martin, Leo Polovets, Mark Fisher, Massimo Ilario, Michael Fogus,
Michael G. Noll, Patrick Dennis, Pedro Ferrera Bertran, Philipp Janert, Rodrigo
Abreu, Rudy Bonefas, Sam Ritchie, Siva Kalagarla, Soren Macbeth, Timothy Chk-
lovski, Walid Farid, and Zhenhua Guo.
N
ATHAN MARZ
Licensed to Mike He <capitain@gmail.com>