Spark’s primary abstraction is a distributed collection of items called a Dataset. Datasets can be created from Hadoop InputFormats (such as HDFS files) or by transforming other Datasets. Due to Python’s dynamic nature, we don’t need the Dataset to be strongly-typed in Python. As a result, all Datasets in Python are Dataset[Row], and we call it `DataFrame` to be consistent with the data frame concept in Pandas and R. Let’s make a new DataFrame from the text of the README file in the Spark source directory:
You can get values from DataFrame directly, by calling some actions, or transform the DataFrame to get a new one. For more details, please read the _[API doc](api/python/index.html#pyspark.sql.DataFrame)_.