This has nothing to do with computer graphics – but some of you may know that I continue to dabble in data mining and machine learning as well.

If you’re interested in learning the hottest framework for analyzing large data sets on a cluster of computers – check out my new MOOC on Udemy: “Taming Big Data with Apache Spark – Hands On!” Here’s a coupon for $15 you can use.

The course includes over 15 hands-on examples, and 5 hours of video. In it, we’ll analyze movie ratings, weather data, e-commerce data, and even social networks of Marvel superheroes! It’s fun stuff, and by the end you’ll be producing movie recommendations using a million real movie ratings on an actual cluster hosted by Amazon’s Elastic MapReduce service.

It uses Python as its programming language, and it’s easy to pick up if you’ve got any programming or scripting ability. Apache Spark’s a valuable skill to have – it ticks off the buzzwords “big data” and “cloud computing” in one fell swoop! If you’re interested in learning something new, and making yourself even more valuable as a developer, please check it out.