Learning Apache Kafka

by Nishant Garg

Start from scratch and learn how to administer Apache Kafka effectively for messaging About This Book Quickly set up Apache Kafka clusters and start writing message producers and consumers Write custom producers and consumers with message partition techniques Integrate Kafka with Apache Hadoop and Storm for use cases such as processing streaming data Who This Book Is For This book is for readers who want to know more about Apache Kafka at a hands-on level; the key audience is those with software development experience but no prior exposure to Apache Kafka or similar technologies. It is also useful for enterprise application developers and big data enthusiasts who have worked with other publisher-subscriber-based systems and want to explore Apache Kafka as a futuristic solution. What You Will Learn Set up both single- and multi-node Kafka clusters and start sending messages Understand the internals of Kafka's design and learn about message compression and replication in Kafka Explore additional settings and configuration changes to achieve ever more complex goals Write Kafka message producers and custom consumers using the Kafka API Integrate Kafka with Apache Hadoop and Storm Integrate Kafka with other tools for logging, packaging, and so on Administer Kafka effectively and consistently with cluster management tools In Detail Kafka is one of those systems that is very simple to describe at a high level but has an incredible depth of technical detail when you dig deeper. Learning Apache Kafka Second Edition provides you with step-by-step, practical examples that help you take advantage of the real power of Kafka and handle hundreds of megabytes of messages per second from multiple clients. This book teaches you everything you need to know, right from setting up Kafka clusters to understanding basic blocks like producer, broker, and consumer blocks. Once you are all set up, you will then explore additional settings and configuration changes to achieve ever more complex goals. You will also learn how Kafka is designed internally and what configurations make it more effective. Finally, you will learn how Kafka works with other tools such as Hadoop, Storm, and so on.

Genres: Programming, Technology

132 pages, Paperback

First published February 26, 2015

Reviews

[Michael Koltsov · Rating 2 out of 5]

As I usually do, I made a specific task for myself: learn how to use Apache Kafka efficiently during the weekend. Since I’m a book kind of guy I decided that I need to read a book first before writing any code.

This book is an obvious choice since it’s been recently re-edited and seems to be the only Kafka-related book at the moment. So why not? I decided to give it a try. 1 book – 1 weekend, what could possibly go wrong?

The first red flag for me was the fact that all the code examples are in Java. How so? Kafka seemed to be an agnostic technology with APIs for both Scala & Java. This might be just a matter of author’s personal preference. The next red flag was that the code examples are very similar to what is given in official documentation. Nevertheless, I decided to read the book. Thanks to my subscription to Safari Books online library I didn’t have to pay for it.

Unfortunately, my first impression was right. The book is nothing more than a couple of blog posts contained under a hard cover. Technical details that I utterly needed were not given, instead a lot of Javadocs have been copy-pasted all-around. Code examples are too generic to have any value in them.

Frankly, this video has provided much more than all time i’ve spent reading the book.

https://vimeo.com/63040812

[Łukasz Słonina · Rating 2 out of 5]

Very short book about Kafka, more like a blog posts combined into book.

[Eswara · Rating 2 out of 5]

Readable in less than an hour, nice book to get hands on with apache kafka