...For a longer high-level description of Hadoop-BAM, refer to the article "Hadoop-BAM: directly manipulating next generation sequencing data in the cloud" in Bioinformatics Volume 28 Issue 6 pp. 876-877, available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/bts054
Note that the library part of Hadoop-BAM is mainly for developers with experience in using Hadoop. The command line tools of Hadoop-BAM should be understandable to all users, but they are limited in scope.
See the SeqPig project for a higher-level interface to the file formats supported by Hadoop-BAM: http://seqpig.sourceforge.net
See Seal for Hadoop-based read alignment tools, Seal: http://biodoop-seal.sourceforge.net