Strata Conference New York + Hadoop World 2012: Complete Video Compilation by O'Reilly Media, Inc.

 December 28, 2012

When I’ve been selected to review, I was shocked by the amount of material that is hidden in this product.

This is more than 100 hours of videos of the Strata and Hadoop World conference.

The material is divided in three sections: Keynotes (14 videos), Tutorials (64 videos) and Sessions (81 videos).

The Keynotes are really short video (7~15 minutes each) that tend to be some sort of advertise of the companies that are sponsors (I guess) of the event. This is nice, but I would not waste time on these, if a person has really small amount of time.

The Tutorials are way longer videos (from 30’ to 8 hours for each session) and the longest are split into multiple videos. This material is really important to whoever is looking for learning some basic things about Hadoop and the Hadoop ecosystem. I would definitely suggest to any new user the video “An introduction to Hadoop” by Mark Fei (total 174 minutes). The topic is really good for a beginner and Mark Fei is a wonderful speaker. I really appreciated him.

The Sessions are sort of insights on different topics. Each session touches a different topic and they are between 10 and 50 minutes long. The sessions tend to be really specifics, so I suggest to anyone that is not already an Hadoop expert to look the Tutorials before starting with the sessions.

I should also mention that this huge amount of video showed me some limitations of the O’Reilly website that I hope will soon be fixed. The first one is about the “Watch” button. On my computer the video reproduction does not work. It may be an O’Reilly problem or my problem, since I use a Linux powered netbook. In any case, I think it should work even on my computer. The second limitation is about the download feature. The maximum speed I’ve reached is ~300Kb/s. Maybe because I’m in Italy, but I would expect O’Reilly to have a CDN. Another option would be to use a decentralized system like Torrent (but maybe they fear the unauthorized distribution). The third limitation is about the lacking of multiple selection to be able to download multiple videos with a single command.

Overall, I do suggest this videos for the quality of the material. The price is surely high (399.99$), but the material really worth it.

PS: The fifth star is on hold for the platform limitations and not for the quality of the material that would have taken 5 stars, if considered alone.

Disclaimer: I received a free electronic copy of this book as part of the O’Reilly Blogger Program