If you happen to be in SF Bay Area and would like to get some hands-on experience working with Apache Bigtop (incubating) feel free to join the meetup that is running within the framework of "Silicon Valley Hands On Programming Events": http://www.meetup.com/HandsOnProgrammingEvents/
Our sessions are running on Saturdays 3-5pm @Biocurious: http://biocurious.org/ The next meeting is going to be this coming Sat 12/10: http://www.meetup.com/HandsOnProgrammingEvents/events/43298072/ The upcoming class will mostly focus on integration testing aspects of Bigtop. Future meetings will cover a lot of practical things ranging from deployment using Puppet all the way to exploring Bigdata tricks. There are few prerequisites to the class: basic Linux, basic Java, but that's pretty much it. Thanks, Roman.
