Welcome to GeekCap! This is the preview release of the GeekCap web site, so let me show you around a bit. This page is used for announcements (like this) and shows you what is new (below).

GeekCap is arranged into "Campuses", or communities if you like. Each campus presents a collection of three things for its topic area:

  • Articles: just as the name suggests, articles educate you about some topic. Articles may be hosted here at GeekCap or might be links to other sites (I have over 400 articles up on InformIT.com and I'll point you to them rather than rewrite them!)
  • Courses: courses are comprised of online classes, usually 20-30 minutes in length. The standard format is an MP4 video file that contains a slide presentation narriated by one of our instructors. Some classes are free and some cost education units, but we'll get into that later. You are free to pick and choose the classes that you want to take, courses are just a categorical grouping for you.
  • Learning Tracks: if there is a topic that you're interested in learning, then these learning tracks may help you do so. The purpose of a learning track is to take a subject, like Spring RESTful Web Services, and summarize a list of articles, books, web resouces, classes, and so forth into a plan that you can follow to learn that topic.

Feel free to look around - I'd recommend starting by exploring a campus that interests you, such as the Java Campus (mine), and see the articles, courses, and learning tracks. I welcome your feedback at steve@geekcap.com.

Although I haven't been publishing much directly on GeekCap, I have been writing. There is a link below to an article that I wrote about Storm for JavaWorld and then there are links to the three installments that I wrote about Hadoop for InformIT.com. The Hadoop article series will walk you through installing and setting up a Hadoop environment, building the "Word Count" MapReduce application (the MapReduce equivalent to "Hello, World"), and thinking in MapReduce. The key to writing good Hadoop, and hence MapReduce, applications is learning to think about your problems in the MapReduce way. Part 3 in the series tries to show you just that!

The latest article I published was about Akka for JavaWorld. In this article I describe how to use the actor model to develop highly-scalable concurrent code.

So what's next? I am working on an article about Vert.x for JavaWorld, you should see that in a few weeks, so stay tuned...

Best Regards,

Steven Haines

Articles

Open source Java projects: Akka (external link)

Posted By Steven Haines on May 8, 2013

The actor model is a message-passing paradigm that resolves some of the major challenges of writing concurrent, scalable code for today's distributed systems. In this installment of Open source Java projects, Steven Haines introduces Akka, a JVM-based toolkit and runtime that implements the actor model. Get started with a simple program that demonstrates how an Akka message passing system is wired together, then build a more complex program that uses concurrent processes to compute prime numbers.

Applied Big Data Analysis in the Real World with MapReduce and Hadoop (external link)

Posted By Steven Haines on Jan 23, 2013

In the third article in this series, I demonstrate how to build a meaningful Hadoop MapReduce application to analyze hourly website usage from a set of Apache HTTP Server logs. Learn how to analyze a business problem the MapReduce way and then how to structure key and value types to fit the MapReduce model.

Building a MapReduce Application with Hadoop (external link)

Posted By Steven Haines on Jan 16, 2013

As the amount of captured data increases over the years, so do our storage needs. Companies are realizing that “data is king,” but how do we analyze it? Through Hadoop. In the second article in this series, I explain what a MapReduce application is and how to build a simple one.

Big Data Analysis with MapReduce and Hadoop (external link)

Posted By Steven Haines on Jan 10, 2013

As the amount of captured data increases over the years, so do our storage needs. Companies are realizing that “data is king,” but how do we analyze it? Through Hadoop. In this article, Steven Haines presents an overview of Hadoop’s architecture and demonstrates, from a high-level, how to build a MapReduce application.

Open source Java projects: Storm (external link)

Posted By Steven Haines on Dec 6, 2012

Storm is a big data framework that is similar to Hadoop but fine-tuned to handle unbounded data streams. In this installment of Open source Java projects, learn how Storm builds on the lessons and success of Hadoop to deliver massive amounts of data in realtime, then dive into Storm's API with a small demonstration app. This is an article that I wrote that is published as part of JavaWorld's Open Source series.

Courses

We haven't added any courses yet, but keep your eyes open, they will be coming soon!

Learning Tracks

We haven't added any learn tracks yet, but keep your eyes open, they will be coming soon!