Kafka: The Definitive Guide: Real-Time Data and Stream Processing at Scale

by Neha Narkhede, Gwen Shapira, Todd Palino

18 Sep 2020 ★★★★★

Why I read it: The book is presented as ‘a fun read for those interested in distributed systems’. And I am one of those people. + Kafka is one of the tools used in my workplace, so thought it would be nice to know more about it.

What I liked about it: It actually was a fun read. Everything was explained well and with simple language. I did not struggle while reading it at all. It provided in depth knowledge on Kafka – main concepts, how things work, how things should be configured to get a desired effect etc. It also managed to put this information in context – discussing things like data pipelines, peculiarities of multiple data center operations, monitoring and alerting in general.

What I disliked: I might not have been the target audience for the book. The book went really really in depth into various configurations, scripts you can run etc. And I wanted to just familiarize myself with Kafka architecture.

Quote: The same way that sharks must keep moving or they die, consumers must keep polling Kafka or they will be considered dead.