Customer Reviews

Pentaho 3.2 Data Integration: Beginner's Guide

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Excelent book, truly recommended to them who are newbies or not! Written in step-by-step style it becomes easy to read. Even the experient analysts can benefit with this source.
I can say that is essential to have this book in hand when working with PDI.
As a good Brazilian i could not forget to comment about the examples using soccer matches, it would be best to use data from 1958, 1962, 1970, 1994 or 2002, but that's all right it doesn't compromises the quality of the work. ;-)

The book was written by María Carina Roldán, a valued member of the PDI community. She does a great job of fulfilling the promise of the book's title - it is a great introduction and 'getting started' book for Pentaho Data Integration. I have worked with PDI for the last few years, so I'm hardly a beginner, but I still learned useful techniques and tips from the book.

The book starts with basic information about the tool and installation instructions, then, chapter by chapter, it introduces features and techniques that build upon each other. By the end of the book you'll know how to perform all the standard ETL operations using Pentaho Data Integration and then some. There are tutorials and exercises throughout the book that really you understand the tool and its features.

If your organization uses Informatica, Ab Initio, IBM/Ascential Data Stage, Business Objects Data Integrator, or Cognos Decision Stream, this $45 book could lead to savings of hundreds of thousands of dollars with Pentaho Data Integration, and make you a hero in the process. If your organization can't afford those products, this $45 book could lead to solutions at a fraction of their cost, and make you a hero in the process.

Almost everything in the book applies just as well to PDI V4.0 as it does to V3.2

Disclosure: I was one of the reviewers of the book during its writing so I might be a little biased - but I was not paid for that effort, nor am I being paid to review the finished book. My opinion of it is the same either way. Great book.

Pentaho Data Integration (a.k.a. Kettle) is a great opensource ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) tool with a big community around it.
I started using PDI in 2006 and since then I really appreciated its usefulness and vast opportunities of use.
Data are everywhere and in different sources (excel sheets, database, text file, web services and so on) and there are a lot of needs for them
to be integrated, analyzed, modified and reused.
In my opinion an ETL tool is essential for everyone who works with data.
This guide will help you learning how to use PDI and how to appreciate its power.
It will give you a complete overview of the ETL world and PDI and will give you very strong basis to operate with
great satisfaction, providing you a lot of useful and practical examples.
I think that time spent to learn PDI is a time spent well.

I bought the book because I needed to transform data for work. The book is good from the standpoint that it provides many examples aimed at the beginner, but is not good as a technical reference.

Kettle 3.2 Beginner's Guide is an excellent book for people want to start with Pentaho Data Integration !

More review here: [...]

PDI 3.2 is a rich toolkit for data integration processing. Until recently a major downside was a scattered set of documentation contributed by the open source community. Some was good, some was incomplete, so a considerable part of implementation was spent on the web going through forums for answers.
This new "Beginners Guide" expertly addresses the documentation question (the author being a frequent contributor to the forums) and presents a very complete presentation of the whys and hows for data integration. The tutorial approach (clearly laid out with many screenshots) exposes all the major topics needed as it explains many of the new buzzwords associated with ETL and BI.
The Beginners Guide is a great introduction and intermediate guide to the v3.2 product and expands the coverage of PDI ETL beyond that of the other Pentaho volumes. It is invaluable and should be the very first purchase after the PDI download and install no matter what the developer's expertise might be.
The only downside is that a new PDI version (4.0) was scheduled for release soon after this book was published and the coverage of upcoming 4.0 is relegated to a brief appendix. Since 4.0 is a functional superset of 3.2 this edition will prepare the ETL developer quite well for the future.
A truly useful and recommended book!