This is a textbook so there is no like or dislike, there is only "do" (say like Yoda). I mean, hadoop is a fairly complicated framework, and it isn't usually enjoyable having to slog through a textbook to pick up a new skill.

I really appreciated the authors' approach, starting with a detailed comparison between Hadoop 1 and Hadoop 2. The exposition that accompanied the example code was detailed and insightful, and the proof of its effectiveness was my ability, as a noob hadoop programmer, to successfully debug some of the errors in the code as I was learning it. Which brings me to my only complaint with the book: it seemed to be poorly edited at times.

The first half of the book requires hands-on coding in Java while the second half is an overview of the many offshoot Big Data tools spawned to augment hadoop's capabilities. Hadoop originally was an open source clone of Google's file system, but it has become a globally-adopted standard in its own right. The authors do such an excellent job of presenting concepts and theory that by the end of the book one has a newfound appreciation of the trailblazing work performed by Google engineers who invented a paradigm that creates the illusion of "infinite" data storage capacity and "infinite" bandwidth.