Big data is undoubtedly a vast subject that can seem overly complex at first sight. Practice makes perfect, and so it is with the study of big data--the more you get involved, the more familiar the topics and verbiage gets, and the more comfortable the subject becomes.

A keen study of the various dimensions of the topic of big data analytics will help you develop an intuitive sense of the subject. This book aims to provide a holistic overview of the topic and will cover a broad range of areas such as Hadoop, Spark, NoSQL databases as well as topics that are based on hardware design and cloud infrastructures. In the next chapter, we will introduce the concept of Big Data Mining and discuss about the technical elements as well as the selection criteria for Big Data technologies.