About the Author

Rohit Menon is a senior system analyst living in Denver, Colorado. He has over 7 years of experience in the field of Information Technology, which started with the role of a real-time applications developer back in 2006. He now works for a product-based company specializing in software for large telecom operators.

He graduated with a master's degree in Computer Applications from University of Pune, where he built an autonomous maze-solving robot as his final year project. He later joined a software consulting company in India where he worked on C#, SQL Server, C++, and RTOS to provide software solutions to reputable organizations in USA and Japan. After this, he started working for a product-based company where most of his time was dedicated to programming the finer details of products using C++, Oracle, Linux, and Java.

He is a person who always likes to learn new technologies and this got him interested in web application development. He picked up Ruby, Ruby on Rails, HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and built www.flicksery.com, a Netflix search engine that makes searching for titles on Netflix much easier.

On the Hadoop front, he is a Cloudera Certified Apache Hadoop Developer. He blogs at www.rohitmenon.com, mainly on topics related to Apache Hadoop and its components. To share his learning, he has also started www.hadoopscreencasts.com, a website that teaches Apache Hadoop using simple, short, and easy-to-follow screencasts. He is well versed with wide variety of tools and techniques such as MapReduce, Hive, Pig, Sqoop, Oozie, and Talend Open Studio.

I would like to thank my parents for instilling the qualities of perseverance and hard work. I would also like to thank my wife, Madhuri, and my daughter, Anushka, for being patient and allowing me to spend most of my time studying and researching.