For the kettle afinados out there, two excellent PDI books are already available namely:
- Pentaho 3.2 Data Integration - Beginners Guide, by María Carina Roldán was released in april 2010.
- Pentaho Kettle Solutions - Building Open Source ETL solutions with Pentaho Data Integration, by Matt Casters, Roland Bouman and Jos van Dongen (extensively discussed in a previous post) is available since september 2010.
And if that is not enough, another book is in the making. María Carina Roldán has teamed up with Adrián Pulvirenti to deliver the "Pentaho Data Integration 4: Cookbook" (again with publishing house PACKT).
The book will deliver a series of 'recipes' to solve typical (and less typical) kettle riddles, divided over 9 chapters with the following titles.
- Working with Databases
- Reading and Writing Files
- Manipulating XML Structures
- File Management
- Looking up for Data
- Understanding How Data Flows
- Executing and Reusing Jobs and Transformations
- Integration with Pentaho Suite
- Some More Useful Recipes
I have had the pleasure revising chapters 1 to 7 up to now, and will soon read chapters 8 and 9 which are in the writing.
My impression so far is that the analogy with a cookbook is actually well choosen.The recipes are organised in logical groups like you would have starters, rice dishes, deserts etc in a cookbook, but still the recipes within a same category, though logically related can be very different, like vanilla pudding and chocolate mouse.
Maybe not all of them may be to your liking, as each recipe tackles a different problem. And some people just prefer chocolate over strawberry. But having said that I'm not saying you shouldn't get the book because there might be some recipes you don't like or don't want to use. Actually, while reviewing the book, I found all the recipes interesting. And even if there are a few I won't use to literally cook the dish Maria and Adrian sugges, I will use the ideas I picked up in them to flavor my own dishes.
You can already get the book in RAW format from PACKT right now, or way till the end of april until all chapters are complete and the book becomes available.