As much as I'm a huge fan of Nathan Marz and his work with Clojure and Cascalog... I am hoping this book is about how to make Big Data accessible to programmers across multiple languages.
Nathan, do you think you'll be including pseudo-code, or will one need to be a clojure programmer to best leverage your book?
There's no Clojure in the book (we don't think Clojure should be a prerequisite to learning this important subject). Most of the examples will be in Java.
There is a big emphasis in the book on using multiple languages together. This is reflective of how I myself have architected systems, with our team using Ruby, Python, Clojure, and Java for the same product. Chapter 2 is about creating a schema for your data using Thrift, for example.
The material in the book is most useful when you're working at very large scale (where the RDBMS breaks down). You won't necessarily need the techniques if you're working at smaller scale, but the material will certainly expand your mind on ways to manage and work with data.
Nathan, do you think you'll be including pseudo-code, or will one need to be a clojure programmer to best leverage your book?