Alberto Paro is an engineer, project manager, and software developer. He currently works as freelance trainer/consultant on big data technologies and NoSQL solutions. He loves to study emerging solutions and applications mainly related to big data processing, NoSQL, natural language processing, and neural networks. He began programming in BASIC on a Sinclair Spectrum when he was eight years old, and to date, has collected a lot of experience using different operating systems, applications, and programming languages.

In 2000, he graduated in computer science engineering from Politecnico di Milano with a thesis on designing multiuser and multidevice web applications. He assisted professors at the university for about a year. He then came in contact with The Net Planet Company and loved their innovative ideas; he started working on knowledge management solutions and advanced data mining products. In summer 2014, his company was acquired by a big data technologies company, where he worked until the end of 2015 mainly using Scala and Python on state-of-the-art big data software (Spark, Akka, Cassandra, and YARN). In 2013, he started freelancing as a consultant for big data, machine learning, Elasticsearch and other NoSQL products. He has created or helped to develop big data solutions for business intelligence, financial, and banking companies all over the world. A lot of his time is spent teaching how to efficiently use big data solutions (mainly Apache Spark), NoSql datastores (Elasticsearch, HBase, and Accumulo) and related technologies (Scala, Akka, and Playframework). He is often called to present at big data or Scala events. He is an evangelist on Scala and Scala.js (the transcompiler from Scala to JavaScript).

In his spare time, when he is not playing with his children, he likes to work on open source projects. When he was in high school, he started contributing to projects related to the GNOME environment (gtkmm). One of his preferred programming languages is Python, and he wrote one of the first NoSQL backends on Django for MongoDB (Django-MongoDB-engine). In 2010, he began using Elasticsearch to provide search capabilities to some Django e-commerce sites and developed PyES (a Pythonic client for Elasticsearch), as well as the initial part of the Elasticsearch MongoDB river. He is the author of Elasticsearch Cookbook as well as a technical reviewer of Elasticsearch Server-Second Edition, Learning Scala Web Development, and the video course, Building a Search Server with Elasticsearch, all of which are published by Packt Publishing.

It would have been difficult for me to complete this book without the support of a large number of people.

First, I would like to thank my wife, my children and the rest of my family for their support.

A personal thanks to my best friends, Mauro and Michele, and to all the people that helped me and my family.

I'd like to express my gratitude to everyone at Packt Publishing who are involved in the development and production of this book. I'd like to thank Amrita Noronha for guiding this book to completion and Deepti Tuscano and Marcelo Ochoa for patiently going through the first draft and providing their valuable feedback. Their professionalism, courtesy, good judgment, and passion for books are much appreciated.