Getting Started with Apache Arrow

Regardless of whether you’re a data scientist/engineer, a machine learning (ML) specialist, or a software engineer trying to build something to perform data analytics, you’ve probably heard of or read about something called Apache Arrow and either looked for more information or wondered what it was. Hopefully, this book can serve as a springboard in understanding what Apache Arrow is and isn’t, as well as a reference book to be continuously utilized so that you can supercharge your analytical capabilities.

For now, we’ll start by explaining what Apache Arrow is and what you will use it for. Following that, we will walk through the Arrow specifications, set up a development environment where you can play around with the various Apache Arrow libraries, and walk through a few simple exercises so that you can get a feel for how to use them.

In this chapter, we’re going to cover the following topics:

• Understanding...