• Learn to install and use Cassandra from the ground up
• Design rich schemas that capture the relationships between different data types using compound primary keys
• Master the advanced features available in Cassandra 2.0 through a step-by-step tutorial that builds a real-world application's database layer.

If you're an application developer familiar with SQL databases such as MySQL or Postgres, and you want to explore distributed databases such as Cassandra, this is the perfect guide for you. Even if you've never worked with a distributed database before, Cassandra's intuitive programming interface coupled with the step-by-step examples in this book will have you building highly scalable persistence layers for your applications in no time.

Mat Brown is a professional software engineer in Brooklyn, New York. In his career, he has focused on building consumer-facing web and mobile applications for several companies; he currently works at Genius. Mat is an enthusiastic contributor to the Ruby open source ecosystem. He is the maintainer of Cequel, a Ruby object mapper for Cassandra, and was the original author of Sunspot, a library that seamlessly integrates Solr search into Rails applications.