What you need for this book

In this book, we'll set up a Cassandra cluster. Cassandra server's latest code can be downloaded from http://cassandra.apache.org/download/. We refer to the Cassandra Server version more than or equal to 2.x in our examples; this version requires Java version more than or equal to 1.7 and Python version more than or equal to 2.6. Python is required to run the CQL client cqlsh provided by Cassandra. In later chapters, we use the Datastax Java driver as the Cassandra client; for example, the Cassandra Java driver by Datastax can be downloaded from https://github.com/datastax/java-driver. We will use the driver version 2.1.2 in our examples. Other than that, if you set up a cluster for your development environment, then your development machine should have at least 4 GB of RAM and at least a dual core CPU. While working with a Java client, we expect you to have a basic knowledge of Java. While working on a Cassandra client, use any IDE; for example, Eclipse (https://eclipse.org/), for building. I've provided dependencies according to the Maven (https://maven.apache.org/) and Gradle (https://gradle.org/) frameworks.