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Learner Reviews & Feedback for Introduction to Big Data by University of California San Diego

4.6
stars
10,792 ratings

About the Course

Interested in increasing your knowledge of the Big Data landscape? This course is for those new to data science and interested in understanding why the Big Data Era has come to be. It is for those who want to become conversant with the terminology and the core concepts behind big data problems, applications, and systems. It is for those who want to start thinking about how Big Data might be useful in their business or career. It provides an introduction to one of the most common frameworks, Hadoop, that has made big data analysis easier and more accessible -- increasing the potential for data to transform our world! At the end of this course, you will be able to: * Describe the Big Data landscape including examples of real world big data problems including the three key sources of Big Data: people, organizations, and sensors. * Explain the V’s of Big Data (volume, velocity, variety, veracity, valence, and value) and why each impacts data collection, monitoring, storage, analysis and reporting. * Get value out of Big Data by using a 5-step process to structure your analysis. * Identify what are and what are not big data problems and be able to recast big data problems as data science questions. * Provide an explanation of the architectural components and programming models used for scalable big data analysis. * Summarize the features and value of core Hadoop stack components including the YARN resource and job management system, the HDFS file system and the MapReduce programming model. * Install and run a program using Hadoop! This course is for those new to data science. No prior programming experience is needed, although the ability to install applications and utilize a virtual machine is necessary to complete the hands-on assignments. Hardware Requirements: (A) Quad Core Processor (VT-x or AMD-V support recommended), 64-bit; (B) 8 GB RAM; (C) 20 GB disk free. How to find your hardware information: (Windows): Open System by clicking the Start button, right-clicking Computer, and then clicking Properties; (Mac): Open Overview by clicking on the Apple menu and clicking “About This Mac.” Most computers with 8 GB RAM purchased in the last 3 years will meet the minimum requirements.You will need a high speed internet connection because you will be downloading files up to 4 Gb in size. Software Requirements: This course relies on several open-source software tools, including Apache Hadoop. All required software can be downloaded and installed free of charge. Software requirements include: Windows 7+, Mac OS X 10.10+, Ubuntu 14.04+ or CentOS 6+ VirtualBox 5+....

Top reviews

DK

Aug 11, 2021

I love the course. It goes deep into the foundations, and then finishes up with an actual lab where you learn by practice. I greatly benefited from it and feel I have achieved a milestone in big data.

HM

Sep 8, 2019

I love the course. It goes deep into the foundations, and then finishes up with an actual lab where you learn by practice. I greatly benefited from it and feel I have achieved a milestone in big data.

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1776 - 1800 of 2,460 Reviews for Introduction to Big Data

By Jinx H

Feb 11, 2022

It's not easy to understand all the concepts and definitions. The questions and quiz are a little abstract. For example, the task for mapreduce algorithem is absolutely inconvenient. Preparing the Hadoop environment is a very time-consuming job. It would be better to find a way for the learners to easily understand everything and not just physically memorize them. And a clould environment with Hadoop preinstalled would be a good idea.

By Diksha C

Jan 20, 2018

This course is a really good introduction to Big Data. I come from an EE background and barely have any experience in IT/CS field. I was able to adapt and get a really good introduction to the Big Data world. My favorite part of the course is Hands On exercises at the end and quiz based on the hands-on exercise that provides you experience with Cloudera, Hadoop and MapReduce. I enjoyed this course and would recommend this course.

By MEGAT A F A S

Jun 22, 2019

This is an excellent introductory course on Big Data in general and introduce to basic usage of Hadoop using Cloudera on a virtual machine. This course could be improved further especially to working professionals by spreading the course over 4 - 6 weeks instead as the 3 weeks duration is very short as the coverage of this course is quite broad. Thank you to the course instructors for preparing this wonderful course.

By Kornel T

Nov 25, 2021

Overall information on Big Data. I enjoyed the course though it could be refreshed. Short introduction and then straight o Hadoop, it would be good to have some helicopter view on different possibilities application wise and then I will say more practical uses of Hadoop. The tasks were great althou I would love to see it gets more tricky. Some more difficult guided task, to deliver actual insights would be great.

By Edwin D

Jan 27, 2022

The Cloudera Hands-On demo was good, but a bit outdated and it could've been longer than introducing to wordcount or wordmedian. Perhaps, that's as simple as it gets. But maybe that's enough for an intro. It'd be nice to know how to take the foundations from this course to the next level with a related course or one with more advanced topics particularly one with challenges encountered in industry.

By Alireza A B

Jul 20, 2017

good overview on Big Data. I like the intoroduction to Hadoop using the Cloudera VM, that's where things start to be more quantitative than qualitattive , some parts of the lectures could be improved. Also would be nice to be able to download the entire scripts for the lectures as a pdf at the end of each lecture or each week rather than only having it as a .txt file per lecture.

By Gregory G

Nov 21, 2017

Some of final lab instructions were out dated, i.e. the jar file was not in the directory listed. Perhaps too much time was spent on covering the introductory material. It could have been better with more actual examples and/or talking more about determining whether a data set would be a candidate for using Hadoop.

I enjoyed the class and look forward to the next course.

By Shahin A

Apr 11, 2020

The course in general is good and useful. However, there are a few caveats here and there. For instance, sometimes the questions in the quizes are not comprehensible. Maybe this is the problem of English proficiency for teaching. Also some case-studies can be added to the assignments and course. To train our eyes to figure out various data sources, and potential values.

By Atiqur R R

Sep 3, 2023

I usually do not provide bad review if I get to learn. But the problem with this course is a lot of outdated applications (i.e., old virtual box installation, cloudera old version which is no longer supported so you need to use an alternative bitnami vm or such). This course needs to be updated (or maybe I started this too late). Either an annoying experience.

By Katherine K

Mar 15, 2020

Great course for those new to big data - it helps you understand the core components and processes of big data analytics. As a heads up, the last assignment will require significant computer bandwidth to support the program needed. Overall, very useful, understandable course on a topic that is becoming a foundation for business, society, and government.

By Hugo A A S D

Apr 25, 2022

I can't give the 5th star because of the hands on exercises that are frozen in time. First, with Windows 10 and 11 we have Hyper-V and the course only provides Oracle VMs that are incompatible with Hyper-V. Than, the exercises are in Python 2, and in 2022 it's dead and most of the things we can't make them work because there isn't support for that.

By Emil H M

Jun 22, 2018

Last assignment is hard to understand. You should included a proper direction in how your clear your "out" directory when trying to solve the question. I had to search for quite some time on other sites before I understood how I could create a new folder/directory and run the query from there. Other than that, great introduction to a new field!

By 曾添

Aug 8, 2016

I learned some new things because I'm a total beginner,I think the contents are updated but not very structured,the hands-on part is just a small peek of the whole big data process system and not very useful.It's not a complete course if you don't take the later courses of the whole specialization.So I gave 4 stars for this introduction course.

By Jen

Sep 26, 2019

It's starts slow, building a foundation for people who are completely new to the subject, but by the end, I felt I got a lot from the course. I wish there was a hands-on assignment the first week. Also, it's too bad there wasn't much conversation in the forum. The questions posed between videos were interesting and deserved more attention.

By Youssouf F

Sep 3, 2018

Lorsque je me suis inscrit sur ce cours je ne le pensais pas ainsi, je l'ai sous estime les outils que vous mettez à notre disposition sont de hautes factures et les cours sont très attractifs. Si j'ai donné 4 étoiles au lieu de 5 c'est parce que la transcription en Français n'existe pas encore et c'est un embattant pour les francophones.

By Jagadish B S

Jan 14, 2018

This course has been a wonderful start of this journey. Looks like I am glued to Coursera due to these courses. Paucity of time, good/comprehensive material and other reasons had kept me from proceeding forward till I found this material. Thanks to the two professors and apt material that they have created, this seems to be taking off.

By Talha I

Sep 28, 2017

Good Course. But Lecturers read from the notes. Which removes the human element and sometimes seems too robotic. They should try to bring the person more to the course by not reading and making it more interesting to hear what they are saying. I think the human element was missing but content of the course was very good.

By Fer F

Oct 7, 2022

The content of the course was great, however, it was made several years ago and it needs to be updated. While I was taking the course, the presenter was saying the year of the content, and it made me feel like the data could be outdated material, and as we know, talking about technical topics, it isn't good.

By Wagner G d N

Aug 21, 2018

I'm new to the subject. Content is appropriate for my experience, but it bugs me the poor design and presentation of the course. Activities are ok, but more hands-on exercises, or written tasks will definitely help increase understanding. Overall, course is a good introduction, and It can be completed quickly

By Jürgen B

Aug 1, 2018

I keep wondering when the lectures were recorded and which years data refer to. I do not think that we see 2018 numbers here. In a field such rapidly evolving like BD data and information referring to 2016 or even 2015 is outdated. @Coursera team: Can you please timestamp the videos and the data presented.

By David R D N

Oct 6, 2016

The course material is overall very good and easy to understand, although a bit abstract at certain points (mostly when it comes to technical things like what MapReduce consists of and what Programming Models are). Regardless, the instructors do a great job of explaining the concepts. Great course overall

By Andrew O

Jun 8, 2020

Getting the right computer that can run the virtual machine is a must. After that, there were still all kinds of error messages due to various reasons. The discussion forum on this topic was helpful to a certain extent but can be improved. Running the virtual machine was quite straightforward after that

By Emerald M

Feb 11, 2018

I loved this courses real life examples of the materials being discussed. It not only held my attention but also gave me a better understanding of how I might use it. The materials took what could be very complex realities and broke them down to 'bite size' pieces. OVERALL: GREAT COURSE FOR BEGINNERS.

By Hassaan A

May 25, 2018

it was my first experience of an online course . the course was very suitable for the beginners as describes and was very easy to learn . Just had a little problem in starting the cloudera virtual machine by following the given steps in the course . coursera is very good learning platform . Thank You.

By Agatha H

Apr 24, 2017

I'm grateful to the instructor(s). However, when I turned on closed caption to get used to the accent, the CC text covered part of the slide information. Overall, this is a good course to take. I'm glad I took it. Also, I was hoping that there's a clear instruction of Cloudera Quick Start on Linux.