This document provides an overview of the skills, tools, and techniques needed for big data science. It discusses infrastructure requirements like Hadoop and NoSQL, as well as necessary talent and analytic capabilities. A case study is presented using data from Stack Overflow to demonstrate the end-to-end process of exploring data, building features, creating structured and unstructured models, and ensembling models to solve a business problem. The document emphasizes that achieving early success in big data science requires a blend of analysis and scripting skills along with an understanding of relevant techniques, but large teams of PhDs or major investments are not necessarily needed.