Why this Book? Hadoop has been the base for most of the emerging technologies in today’s big data world. It changed the face of distributed processing by using commodity hardware for large data sets. Hadoop and its ecosystem were used in Java, Scala, and Python languages. Developers coming from a .NET background had to learn one of these languages. But not anymore. This book solely focuses on .NET developers and uses C# as the base language. It covers Hadoop and its ecosystem components, such as Pig, Hive, Storm, HBase, and Spark, using C#. After reading this book, you—as a .NET developer—should be able to build end-to-end big data business solutions on the Azure HDInsight platform. Azure HDInsight is Microsoft’s managed Hadoop-as-a-service offering in the cloud. Using HDInsight, you can get a fully configured Hadoop cluster up and running within minutes. The book focuses on the practical aspects of HDInsight and shows you how to use it to tackle real-world big data problems. The audience for this book includes anyone who wants to kick-start Azure HDInsight, wants to understand its core fundamentals to modernize their business, or who wants to get more value out of their data. Anyone who wants to have a solid foundational knowledge of Azure HDInsight and the Hadoop ecosystem should take advantage of this book. The focus of the book appeals to the following two groups of readers. To get the most out of this book, follow along with the sample code and do the hands-on programs directly in Sandbox or an Azure HDInsight environment. About versions used in this book: Azure HDInsight changes very rapidly and comes in the form of Azure service updates. Also, HDInsight is a Hadoop distribution from Hortonworks; hence, it also introduces a new version when available. The basics covered in this book will be useful in upcoming versions too. Happy coding.