[aykhans]

Adds a hands-on Apache Spark course to the Hands-On Exercises section of documentation.md. The existing entries there are from Spark Summit 2013 and 2014.

Course: https://prepare.sh/course/apache-spark-from-zero-to-production-pipelines

The course covers a standalone cluster, DataFrames and Spark SQL, partitions and shuffles, joins, caching, tuning and Structured Streaming with Kafka and Delta Lake. The lessons are free; the hands-on labs run in browser VMs on the paid plan.

[nchammas]

Hello @aykhans and thank you for this submission. Can you clarify whether you are connected to the linked course?

I see that a lot of linked resources on this page are either broken or no longer relevant. It would be good to update them with something more up-to-date. At the same time, I wonder where to draw the line on things to include here vs. leave to users to find for themselves.

@holdenk @HyukjinKwon - Any thoughts on this topic?

[aykhans]

Hi @nchammas, yes, I'm part of the prepare.sh team, which publishes the course. The lessons run Spark in a live environment in the browser, so people can actually run the code while they read.

Good point about the old links. I checked the page and 13 of them are dead now: the AMP Camp pages, the Spark Summit 2013/2014 pages, the old AWS EMR article, the meetup files page and the zenfractal post. Happy to clean those up here or in a separate PR.

[holdenk]

So I have a JIRA to more broadly update the resources to current ones, I don't have any particular views on prepare.sh's courses (although ideally we'd have a committer or similar person who's been involved in the community for a long time vouch for new resources we're adding to avoid adding non helpful resources).