As of now there are two market leaders in providing apache spark certification for developers,MapR and Databricks. I chose MapR with the following reasons.
1)MapR certification cost is $250,but i got a promotion code with discount of $150,https://www.mapr.com/apache-spark-promo so actual cost of the certification was $100 .Whereas Databricks costs $300.
2)MapR certification was in Scala,which i am comfortable with,where as in Databricks you can getquestions in any language(Scala,Python,Java).
3)MapR and Databricks covers equal syllabus for the certification.
Tips to clear certification.
1)Practice,Practice and practice each and every module in detail.Like you can get questions on how to get applicationName from SC or SparkConf.
2)These were lots of question on PairRDD and most of them were coding based.Make sure you have tried each transformation and action.like sortByKey(),groupByKey,etc.These are only few questions on theory(MachineLearning had 30 % theory).
3)The exam is 120 mins long ,so have patience and look into each and every question in detail before answering.I completed my exam in 100 mins.
4)Learning spark is the bible for the exam.
5)For MachineLearning ,read blogs from MapR only,you should be aware of clustering,collaborative filtering and classification and what algorithms are used in situations.Like Kmeans is used for clustering.
6)Try examples on Accumulators and Broadcast variables.
7)Try example on spark and look into the WebUI (/4040).how the stages ,jobs and tasks are executed and under which section.
8)I have covered Spark SQL,Spark Streaming and Admin in youtube channel.That would be good for beginners to start with
9)There were no questions on GraphX
10)Read Spark original programming guide for the latest updates.http://spark.apache.org/docs/latest/programming-guide.html
Books
- Learning Spark. Make sure you’ve read and understood everything in this book and gone through the examples.
- Databricks Spark Reference Applications on GitBook.
- Databricks Spark Knowledge Base on GitBook. Good guide on best practices, certainly worth reading.
In the end a good practice,patience during exam will be the key to success.
