New navigation feature in Cloudera docs: Categories

If you've visited the Cloudera documentation lately, you might have noticed some new links down at the bottom of each page. The doc team implemented a system of Wiki-style categories, covering various themes for each page:

• Component names
• Audience
• Tasks
• Features
• And more aspects of interest to readers

Let's take an example from the Impala docs:

• You start by viewing any page related to Impala.
• At the bottom are a set of Category links, including one for "Impala".
• The Impala category page includes links to all Impala-related pages, even ones that are scattered among the Installation Guide, Administration Guide, and Security Guide.
• Let's say from there you jump over to CREATE TABLE.
• At the bottom of that page, you'll see links to more categories, such as SQL and DDL.

Now you can explore the documentation to your heart's content, knowing that you are always only 2 clicks away from any related topic. My favorite paths are like "any topic related to HBase, Oozie, Crunch, etc." -> the category page for that component -> the corresponding installation, administration, or security information for that same component.

If the number of links on a category page is too much to easily scan for the information you're looking for, there's a type-ahead lookup field for all the items on the page. For example, the Administrators category page has tons of entries, but if you are looking for how to administer Sentry, you just start typing 'sentry' and choose from the relevant matching titles:

Update to "Getting Started with Impala" in the Pipeline

Sometime soon, there will be an update to the first edition of the "Getting Started with Impala" book from O'Reilly. It'll have about 30 new pages covering new features such as analytic functions, subqueries, incremental statistics, and complex types. This is where the e-version from O'Reilly proves its worth, because existing owners will get a free update.

O'Reilly store page
Amazon page