Reddit mentions of Hadoop

Books (WARNING: these may be a bit dated since this field is changing quite rapidly):

• Hadoop: The Definitive Guide
  
• Cassandra: The Definitive Guide
  
• Mongo: The Definitive Guide
  
  But be careful with the loaded term "NoSQL". Don't get sucked up into the buzz. The main things the NoSQL movements popularized were:
  
  

1. Recognition that your data and your queries have attributes and requirements INDEPENDENT of any storage solution. You need to understand those FIRST before you can talk about what kind of database engine to store it in. That and it opened up the idea that 3NF isn't always the best idea (and sometimes can be the worst thing to do to your data).
   
   
2. (This is where the term 'Big Data' starts to come in). NoSQL often is tightly coupled with distributed computing. That's because the size/volume of certain datasets simply cannot be practically stored on a single physical server. So you have to focus on ways to send your code to the data rather than the other way around.
   
   And often, there's no reason to use Hadoop/Mongo/Cassandra/etc. when your dataset doesn't call for it. Use the right tool for the job.
   
   The books are just starting points too. Look in the chapter notes to find a wealth of links to original papers and essays like so:
   
   

• Paxos (used in Zookeeper):
  
  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paxos_%28computer_science%29
    
  • http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/paxos-simple.pdf
    
  • http://pine.cs.yale.edu/pinewiki/Paxos
    
  • http://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs7412/2011sp/paxos.pdf
    
• Phi Accural Failure Detection - used in Cassandra
  
  • http://ddg.jaist.ac.jp/pub/HDY+04.pdf
    
• Codd's "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shard Data Banks"
  
  • http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~zives/03f/cis550/codd.pdf
    
• Jim Gray's "The Transaction Concept" - and oldie, but a good one
  
  • http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/gray/papers/theTransactionConcept.pdf
    
• Gregor Hohpe's "Starbucks Does Not Use Two-Phase Commit"
  
  • http://www.eaipatterns.com/ramblings/18_starbucks.html
    
• Flixster sharding strategies
  
  • http://lsvp.wordpress.com/2008/06/20
    
• Berkley "The Case for Shared Nothing" - Cassandra concept
  
  • http://db.cs.berkeley.edu/papers/hpts85-nothing.pdf
    
• Amazon's Dynamo paper
  
  • http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2007/10/amazons_dynamo.html
    
• Dwight Merriman (video on CAP spectrum)
  
  • http://bit.ly/7r6kRg
    
• Facebook Cassandra paper
  
  • http://www.cs.cornell.edu/projects/ladis2009/papers/lakshman-ladis2009.pdf
    
• Twitter Cassandra analytics
  
  • http://engineering.twitter.com/2010/07/cassandra-at-twitter-today.html
    
• Cloudkick using Cassandra for metrics
  
  • https://www.cloudkick.com/blog/2010/mar/02/4_months_with_cassandra
    
• Staged Event-Driven Architecture (SEDA) - baked into the Cassandra architecture
  
  • http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~mdw/proj/seda
    
    Oh, yeah. And take good notes in something like Evernote so you can cut/paste braindumps to NoSQL whitepapers/essays like the above.
    
    And if you're wondering how someone could have time to go through the above, all I can say is STOP WATCHING TV--that's what I did. It's amazing what you can do when you stop caring about the latest reality TV buzz or who won what award in sports or entertainment.