This books fills the need for an easy and holistic book on essential Big Data technologies. Written in a lucid and simple language free from jargon and code, this book provides an intuition for Big Data from business as well as technological perspectives. This book is designed to provide the reader with the intuition behind this evolving area, along with a solid toolset of the major big data processing technologies such as Hadoop, MapReduce, Spark Streaming, and NoSql databases. A complete case study of developing a web log analyzer is included. The book also contains two primers on Cloud computing and Data Mining. It also contains two tutorials on installing Hadoop and Spark. The book contains caselets from real-world stories.