Making distributed computing fun, accessible, and exciting for kids, executives, and curious minds everywhere! 🌐
Buying direct from our store is the best way to support the book: print copies are available signed on request, the e-book is DRM-free (EPUB + PDF), and there's even an Executive Edition you won't find anywhere else.
What's Inside? 🎉
Fun Lessons
Learn how computers work together to solve hard problems.
You'll follow our friends, and their garden gnomes, on their adventures to use data to become influencers.
From there we'll introduce the Python (🐍) programming language, and look to see how we can give our gnome friends a well earned break.
Teamwork Computing
Discover how computers collaborate to solve big problems: just like your friends (or employees) solving problems together
For Executives Too
The same clear, concise explainers that help business leaders understand distributed systems (especially those with an Apache Spark background, be it Snowpark, Databricks, Microsoft Fabric, EMR, etc.) Surprise your engineering and data leaders with the depth of your knowledge.
Getting Set Up 🛠️
To follow along you'll want a Spark and Python notebook. Grab someone to help you with this part — there are a lot of steps, and it's much more fun with company. Helpers: don't feel bad if you get stuck, it happens to everyone!
What is Distributed Computing? 🤔
Imagine you want to find the most popular instagram tag among everyone at your school district, it could take you weeks to collect the results. But what if each classroom collected the results and then you combined them together? You'd be able to get the answer super quickly :)
That's distributed computing! Instead of one big computer doing all the work, many computers work together to solve huge problems, from predicting weather to powering your Google searches, building the next ChatGPT, or even deciding what TikTok videos to show you. Some of these problems are so hard that they can't be solved alone, and others are just way faster when the computers team up.