I came across this lovely analytics company. Think Big Analytics. and I really liked their lovely explanation of the whole she-bang big data etc stuff. Because Hadoop isnt rocket science and can be made simpler to explain and deploy.

Check them out yourself at http://www.thinkbiganalytics.com/resources_reference

Also they have an awesome series of lectures coming up-

check out

http://www.eventbrite.com/org/1740609570

Up and Running with Big Data: 3 Day Deep-Dive

Over three days, explore the Big Data tools, technologies and techniques which allow organisations to gain insight and drive new business opportunities by finding signal in their data. Using Amazon Web Services, you’ll learn how to use the flexible map/reduce programming model to scale your analytics, use Hadoop with Elastic MapReduce, write queries with Hive, develop real world data flows with Pig and understand the operational needs of a production data platform

Day 1:

MapReduce concepts
Hadoop implementation: Jobtracker, Namenode, Tasktracker, Datanode, Shuffle & Sort
Introduction to Amazon AWS and EMR with console and command-line tools
Implementing MapReduce with Java and Streaming

Day 2: