The practical examples in this book use Scala and SBT for Apache Spark-based code development and compilation. A Cloudera CDH 5.3 Hadoop cluster on CentOS 6.5 Linux servers is also used. Linux Bash shell and Perl scripts are used both, to assist in Spark applications and provide data feeds. Hadoop administration commands are used to move and examine data during Spark applications tests.

Given the skill overview previously, it would be useful for the reader to have a basic understanding of Linux, Apache Hadoop, and Spark. Having said that, and given that there is an abundant amount of information available on the internet today, I would not want to stop an intrepid reader from just having a go. I believe that it is possible to learn more from mistakes than successes.