I put together this list for a co-worker who wants to learn more about Cassandra: ( 0.5 beta 2 out now!) Getting Started : Cassandra is surprisingly easy to try out. This walks you through both single-node and clustered setup. The Dynamo paper and Amazon's related article on eventual consistency : Cassandra's replication model is strongly influenced by Dynamo's. Almost everything you read here also applies to Cassandra. (The major exceptions are vector clocks, and even that may change , and Cassandra's support for order-preserving partitioning with active load balancing.) WTF is a SuperColumn ? Arin Sarkissian from Digg explains the Cassandra data model. Operations : stuff you will want to know when you run Cassandra in production Cassandra users survey from Nov 09 : What Twitter, Mahalo, Ooyala, SimpleGeo, and others are using Cassandra for More articles here (Cassandra on OS X seems to be a particularly popular topic) If you want to know more about the interna