Your Parents Still Don’t Know What a Hashtag Is. Let’s Teach Them the Basics of Machine Learning and Streaming Data

Your Parents Still Don’t Know What a Hashtag Is. Let’s Teach Them the Basics of Machine Learning and Streaming Data

Quite often, the digital natives of the family — you — have to explain to the analog fans of the family what PDFs are, how to use a hashtag, a phone camera, or a remote. Imagine if you had to explain what machine learning is and how to use it.

There’s no need to panic. Cloudera produced a series of ebooks — Production Machine Learning For Dummies, Apache NiFi For Dummies, and Apache Flink For Dummies (coming soon) — to help simplify even the most complex tech topics. Using these books, you can answer questions such as: 

“What’s data analytics and why is everyone talking about it?”

“Why I’m not worried about robots taking over my job.”

“Why is my online game so much slower than yours?” 

or “What’s an IoT and what does it have to do with trucks?”

But wait! Don’t be caught acting like your parents in front of your kids. You will never be able to keep up with the latest Tik Tok dances, but you could be able to talk about the latest innovations for self-driving cars. 

Read these books to understand the basics of the state-of-the-art technologies, even if it isn’t your field of expertise:

Learn about production machine learning (ML) and its difference from traditional ML workflows. It turns out it’s much more than just modeling (when you train a computer to distinguish between a cat and a person, for example). 

Production ML systems automate business operations and are capable of handling enormous amounts of real-time data. So if your business depends on continuous cat-person classification, you’ll learn what else you need to do to put this algorithm in production. The book details how to implement such a system, enabling and supporting your business’ growth. 

  • From Apache NiFi For Dummies you’ll learn about the open source project’s fundamentals, use cases, and how to get started, debug, and manage your own dataflows. 

Already confused by unfamiliar words? Read the book to find out what they mean, and why NiFi is an essential tool for data ingestion and movement. Don’t know what data ingestion is? Then you should definitely read the book! 

Hint: Data ingestion is the process of consuming excessively large volumes of data easily to enable enterprise analytics or to feed into ML models. 

  • Have you heard about streaming? Okay, what about streaming data? Then check out a copy of Apache Flink For Dummies, where you can find out about Apache Flink, a highly scalable stream processing engine. 

The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to physical objects with sensors, software, and other technologies that collect and exchange data. A modern train, for example, has hundreds of sensors that inform the engineer and the rail control center about the train’s location, its speed, condition of tracks, and so on. 

The sensors send the data back and forth all the time, so, as you can imagine, it’s a lot of streaming data that has to be analyzed in real-time. That’s just one example of when to use Apache Flink to identify complex patterns within that data and detect any type of anomalies immediately. 

Read all three books to pass as an advanced beginner in these innovative technologies—and impress your friends and family at dinner or barbeque parties.

Cloudera Contributors
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