Career Change! Advice please :-)

[#1]

I am an IT Professional with 11 years of exp. I started off my career as a .Net Developer/ SQL database analyst and an administrator. After 3 years, I got side-lined and moved into portfolio management. However my database foundation is strong. I am planning to bounce back into IT development and I see Big Data Analytics is booming currently. Can anyone please suggest me where should I start?  Do you recommend taking training courses with cloud era in order to eventually build an career in this area? if so what would you recommend as I see there are wide variety and I am confused where to begin.

[#2]

According to NYT columnist Thomas Friedman "2007 the most important software program you've probably never heard of, called Hadoop, which is named after the founder's son's toy elephant, was also released into the wild. Hadoop is the software that enables us to take a million computers, or 10 million computers, and get them to work together as one. That is the foundation of big data.

Hadoop didn't invent this; Google actually invented it. But as Doug Cutting, the founder of Hadoop, explained to me, "Google lives in the future and sends us letters back home." What Google did was invent this and then leave a trail of breadcrumbs for the open source community to reverse-engineer it and produce an open source version of this free for the world. That's what Hadoop is.

[#3]

Can anyone please suggest me where should I start?  

Well I started it off with Apache Hadoop binary on Ubuntu 

Then moved on to manual installation of Cloudera hadoop 

finally landed in Cloudera manager . 

to start with I would suggest you from apache hadoop manual deployment and then side by side Cloudera Quickstart to explore other cdh eco systesm like hive , impala , many more . 

Do you recommend taking training courses with cloud era in order to eventually build an career in this area? 

That totally depends on to be frank to bring up a cluster i mean single node cluster :)) it took me a good20 days because i am from Java J2ee development guy had to roll up my sleeves to  vmare , Linux Os then hang on to hadoop. Cloudera community is pretty active so we have your back on any troubleshooting  :)))

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