Reddit reviews Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life

I'm partial to Cloudera or Horton Works. Both have training courses.

• Cloudera (note they have a course tailored specifically for data analysts)
  
• Horton Works
  
  I personally like good 'ol books. I've taken the Coursera intro and Hive/Pig training courses and while they were invaluable, nothing quite replaces sitting down and working your way through books like Hadoop: The Defininitive Guide or MongoDB: The Definitive Guide. I highly recommend Safari Books Online if you enjoy online reading. Perhaps some of your professional development money could go to paying for an account for that. For those who don't have the money for that, don't underestimate the usefulness of your public library. I currently have 3 books out from my local library on graph/network science (Linked is awesome and a great start for anyone interested in Networks/Graphs).
  
  One thing I'll mention is that Hadoop has really become more of an ecosystem than a produce. HDFS, MapReduce, Pig, Hive, Sqoop, Flume, HBase, Storm, etc. Just saying "Hadoop" is like just saying JQuery. Half the battle with JQuery is knowing how to use the best plugins. It's the same with Hadoop.

For a lighter read on graph theory try Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means. It's a Gee-Wiz kind of book (i.e. light on theory but full of fun facts). And it's likely within your budget.

Linked. I found it interesting in the beginning but it just fizzled. Perhaps another look is in order, but I have a feeling I tried to force-feed myself to find it interesting.

Basic Economics - Thomas Sowell

Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age - Duncan Watts

Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means - Albert-Laszlo Barabasi

Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Theory of Networks - Mark Buchanan

The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins

Sperm Wars: Infidelity, Sexual Conflict, and Other Bedroom Battles - Robin Baker

Motley Crue: The Dirt - Confessions of the World's Most Notorious Rock Band - Neil Strauss

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The World is Flat - Thomas Friedman

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference - Malcolm Gladwell

The Wisdom of Crowds - James Surowiecki

Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster - Jon Krakauer

The Climb - Anatoli Boukreev

Ultramarathon Man: Confessions of an All-Night Runner - Dean Karnazes

A phrase that you might be looking for is "rich get richer", or in mathematical literature, "preferential attachment processes". There's a very accessible pop-sci book about this:

http://www.amazon.com/Linked-Everything-Connected-Else-Means/dp/0452284392

Thanks for asking. Very often our (hopefully undeserved) reputations keep others from asking us anything.

There are many good answers here, but if you wish to know how Christiany became dominate, perhaps you would enjoy the explaination in Linked: How Everything is Connected and What it Means.

What is really interesting (not in the book) is what happened to the Roman priests, or what didn't happen. It seems they just switched to being Christian Priests, in many cases they didn't even change their ceremonies or messages! Fun stuff.

Understanding the depth, complexity and interdependency of the systems on which we are relying to base our daily lives on, it's tempting to imagine a world collapse if something breaks down. Heck, it's ever fun and productive - taking in mind all the implications of such a major event.


Power(\internet\financial computer systems) is off - what happens? demographically, economically, health-wize, politically(on both federal,regional and international levels) and in bazillion different aspects our life will change in ways we can't imagine.


However, these scenarios, though tempting, are unlikely to the negligible level. It's not because they are designed in a robust form to withstand all bumps and tensions. It's because they are not.

All these systems are dynamic, evolved complex processes that adjusted (and still are) to answer different gravities, shocks and shifts.
In essence, that means that a simultaneous failure of all the AOL servers(holding a major part of the internet backbone) will probably adjust the form of routing data physically and logically through the system. It will affect billions of people, dollars, jobs, email accounts and watts, but it will not kill the internet. It will change the internet as we know it, but facebook changed the internet as we know it. Every word of the implementation of TCP\IP changed it, maybe more than the outage of AOL servers. "Shutting it down" means a dysfunction in hundreds of thousands of machines, designed and functioning in various ways, connected with each other. (or, damage done to hundreds of extremly protected, backed-up and well designed machines). A good review of the vulnerabilities of complex, organically evolved networks are well described in a book I know (sorry for the ad. It just felt relevant)

TL;DR

the collapse the internet, or any complex organic system is very interesting but involves an extreme(very, very extreme) cataclysm that will alter the whole system to unknown, new system. Otherwise, randomly placed damages to the system are part of it's every day evolution and will not change the system as we know it.


(Replace "system" with "internet" so it'll be an easier read)

how does that compare to this

Yeah, I think it's pretty wild stuff. It just blows my mind that the biochemical network within a cell can be influenced by the emergent properties of the network itself (instead of any physical or chemical properties). The behavior of a network translates across applications - it's weird. Here's what got me into it - it's a pretty approachable read for the topic.

Anyone here read Brave New War or Linked?