Hardly any echnology trend these days is drawing more attention than the Big Data trend. And, when talking Big Data, the subject of Hadoop comes up, as it remains the star open source framework for drawing insights from large data sets. Big tech companies like Yahoo and eBay use Hadoop extensively, but it’s also used by smaller companies these days, and we’ve reported before that the job market is very healthy for people with Hadoop and Big Data skills.

In this post, you’ll find our updated set of the very best resources for gaining expertise with Hadoop, and many of the resources don’t cost a lot of time or money. They may even lead to work for you in the Big Data arena.