About this Book
With Spark GraphX in Action we hope to bring down to earth the sometimes esoteric topic of graphs, while explaining how to use them from the in-memory distributed computing framework that has gained the most mindshare, Apache Spark.
We assume the reader has no previous knowledge of Spark, Scala, and graphs, but we move so quickly through the material that previous exposure to at least one of these would be helpful. We attempt to be particularly gentle with our use of Scala. We provide a brief introduction to Scala in chapter 3 and Scala tips throughout the book whenever a new Scala concept is introduced (these are listed in appendix D). In fact, we have recommended this book as a concise introduction to Scala, pointing to chapter 3, the Scala tips, and appendix D.
In addition, we completely avoid the mathematical proofs that are common in college courses in graph theory. Our focus is on graph algorithms and applications, and sometimes we pull in graph structure terminology as needed.
We target version Spark/GraphX 1.6 in this book.
The intended reader is someone who has a lot of development experience in some programming language such as Java, but graphs lend themselves so naturally to illustrations that non-developers will be able to glean ideas about what graphs can be used for.
