There is a reason why deploying Spark on Amazon EMR is added as one of the first recipes in this edition of the book. The majority of the production deployments of Spark happen on EMR (in fact, the majority, and increasingly so, big data deployments happen on EMR). If you understand this recipe well, you may skip the rest of the recipes in this chapter, unless you are doing an on-premises deployment.
Since this topic is of paramount importance in the current context, a lot more theory is being provided than what a typical cookbook would have. You can skip the theory section and directly go to the How to do it.. section, but I encourage you not to do so.