This document provides an overview of MapReduce theory and implementation: - MapReduce is a programming model that allows for automatic parallelization and distribution of large-scale data processing across hundreds/thousands of CPUs. - It borrows concepts from functional programming, requiring users to implement map and reduce functions. Map processes key-value pairs in parallel while reduce combines intermediate outputs. - The MapReduce framework handles fault tolerance, locality of data and tasks, and other optimizations to make large data processing efficient and scalable.