This is the first in a series of articles which highlight the best open source software for making sense of Big Data. This article examines the finest open source software that provide full-featured search engines through an application programming interface. With scalable, high-performance indexing, the featured software here is designed for performing information retrieval functions on Big Data.

The buying and selling of products or services over electronic systems such as the Internet and other computer networks is known as eCommerce. This type of trading offers many advantages over 'traditional shopping' for both the buyer and the seller.

Keeping a diary of your daily life is an activity that is held dear by many people. It represents a good way of storing personal or business information on a day-to-day-basis. Keep track of notes and thoughts through the day, organize and secure memories, ideas, business transactions, emails, accounts, future plans, contact lists, and even secret information.

HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is a markup language used to create web pages and other information that is intended for display in a web browser. Each markup code is known as an element or a tag. The web developer uses these elements to format different parts of the document. The elements tell the web browser how to display the information (both text and images) to the user.

Lisp is a practical, expression-oriented, interactive programming language which uses linked lists as one of its major data structures. A Lisp list is written with its elements separated by whitespace, and surrounded by parentheses. Lisp source code is itself comprised of lists. The language has many unique features that make it excellent to study programming constructs and data structures. Many regard Lisp as an extremely natural language to code complex symbolic reasoning programs. Lisp is popular in the fields of artificial intelligence and symbolic algebra.

A web server is computer software that delivers web pages on request to clients using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). It serves the files that form web pages to web users; the content is in the form of HTML documents, images, style sheets, and scripts.

Most components of a web application produce operational log files. Some logs are written by each application in a unique format. Other components generate out-of-the-box logs. Monitoring system logs is an essential activity for anyone charged with taking decisions. System administrators need to monitor logs to look out for unusual activity, to troubleshoot applications and websites that are under their control. By scanning logs, extracting and correlating data, system administrators can investigate and resolve problems, carry out capacity planning, help to detect vulnerabilities, ensure the smooth running of services and balancing capacity, and establish who has used services and when.

Disk partitioning is the means of dividing a hard disk drive into multiple logical storage units referred to as partitions. A partition is a contiguous set of blocks on a drive that are treated as an independent disk.

Mobile application development is the process by which software is created for handheld devices. This article focuses on tools which help developers create applications for mobile phones. The purpose of application frameworks and libraries is to enable developers to spend their time on the creative and interesting part of development, alleviating the repetitive overhead associated with common development patterns.

A podcast is a form of digital media consisting of an episodic program downloaded or streamed over the Internet using an XML protocol called RSS. Podcast episodes can be audio radio, video files, PDFs, or ePub files. These episodes can be viewed and listened to on a number of different devices including computers, portable media players, and smartphones.

We have written a range of guides highlighting excellent free books for popular programming languages. Check out the following guides: C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, CoffeeScript, HTML, Python, Ruby, Perl, Haskell, PHP, Lisp, R, Prolog, Scala, Scheme, and SQL.