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.
This book is still a work in progress, therefore you can freely read it and contribute through Github.
From my point of view, this book should be considered not more than a manual listing most of the features of ECMAscript 2015 with examples. It’s not yet finished, but imho i doubt that it will be more than a list of features.
On the other side, it can save you a lot of time if you’re looking for one place to get familiarized with most of the new constructions that were added to JS recently and you’re not in a mood to chase a lot of blog posts dispersed throughout the Internet.
My score (book is still 60% complete, hence this is not a final score) 3/5
Before even starting to prepare for this certification I felt pretty confident that I’m able to secure it without dropping a sweat. After passing the certification I felt that I have been completely wrong since the beginning =)
The reason for my confidence was that I contribute to spark-packages as well as to some Spark-related OSS projects (i.e. Apache Zeppelin), apart from the fact that I’m using Spark for more than a year now and I’ve been on the first Spark Summit and a number of Spark-related meetups in London. I thought that’d be more than enough just to skim a recommended “Learning Spark” book by one of the Spark’s creators before the exam.
I wish I had at least read the impressions of those who’d gone to the exam before me =)
I can definitely say that it’s one of the toughest IT certifications I’ve ever passed. O’reilly & Databricks have really put a lot of emphasis on practical experience that can’t be read anywhere and can’t be constituted without deep digging into the framework internals. I had no experience with Spark on YARN since I was using it mostly on Mesos cluster or in standalone mode, which made me drop a lot of sweat =)
If I had been looking for a new developer with Spark experience I would surely have given him a number of points if he has this certificate. It’s really based on practical experience, but not on theoretical knowledge which makes passing it valuable.
This particular book should be included if Spark will eventually get a nice and shiny box version with caps and T-shirts inside. What more can I say? This book is partly written by the creator of Spark himself, hence it should be treated as a comprehensive and succinct manual which unfortunately it doesn’t have as of today (for free).
Luckily, if you’ve spent a relatively small amount of money to buy/read/learn/try all examples you will know two times more than a typical Spark developer with 1 year of experience under his belt.
The only problem I had with this book is that some of the examples don’t work because the book itself hasn’t been updated to be on track with the most recent version of Spark (which differs a lot from the version described in the book).
This AMA is amazing, i had no idea the real number of IBM’s products. Now i know. Most of them are hilarious. People are really “loving” them. Kudos to Websphere developers!
Please be aware that this thread is full of facepalm and unintentional laughter.
This book is still a work in progress, therefore you can freely read it and contribute through Github.
Before even starting to prepare for this certification I felt pretty confident that I’m able to secure it without dropping a sweat. After passing the certification I felt that I have been completely wrong since the beginning =)
I thought that’d be more than enough just to skim a recommended “Learning Spark” book by one of the Spark’s creators before the exam.
