As someone who is enthusiastic about technology, but not necessarily an insider, I’ve been wondering what Big Data is all about for a while. A few short e-books from O’Reilly media have managed to clear give me a pretty clear picture. This short e-book has certainly helped too, but it’s not the best introduction to the subject that I’ve come across. It is comprised of several essays, expositions and interviews, each of which is meant to give you a taste of what is meant by Big Data. Mike Loukides’ “What is Data Science?” is probably the best pert of the ebook, especially if you are a total noob. However, it is available as a separate Kindle ebook in its own right, and I would recommend that you just read it that way. The interviews are somewhat interesting, but most of them suffer from the tendency of the interlocutors to overhype their own perspective. In the end, I’ve come away from this book believing that Big Data is indeed a qualitatively new way of approaching data, information, and businesses that are constructed around it. However, it’s still a hodgepodge of different skills and practices that cannot quite be pinned down. In a way, this flexibility can be a strength when working in a rapidly changing and competitive technological and business environments, but it makes hard for the outsiders to understand what this field is exactly about.