https://gitter.im/DataStaxCommunity/Cassandra_Spark
To start communicating with Cassandra like a champ, Cassandra's Query Language (CQL) is your best bet. CQL is an SQL-like language, which makes it warm and fuzzy for those of us used to SQL, but don't let that fool you...
We still have to think about how we "converse" with Cassandra differently. When we model our data, we need to think about how we will access it before we model it. It's important to emphasize this point, because you can get into some very ugly territory if you model Cassandra like a relational database. Data Modeling with Cassandra is purely query-driven.