When our students asked us to create a course on Spark, we looked at other Spark related courses in the market and also what are some of the common questions students are asking in websites like stackoverflow and other forums when they try to learn Spark and we saw a recurring theme.

Most courses and other online help including Spark's documentation is not good in helping students understand the foundational concepts. They explain what is Spark, what is RDD, what is "this" and what is "that" but students were most interested in understanding core fundamentals and more importantly answer questions like:

• Why do we need Spark when we have Hadoop ? 
• What is the need for RDD ?
• How Spark is faster than Hadoop?
• How Spark achieves the speed and efficiency it claims ?
• How does memory gets managed in Spark?
• How fault tolerance work in Spark ?

And that is exactly what you will learn in this free Spark Starter Kit course. The aim of this course is to give you a strong foundation in Spark.