With the Kafka Streams for Data Processing Udemy course, I mark as completed my basic journey to learn some basics about this platform. I wanted to do this course as one of the topics it covers, exactly-once semantics, were precisely one of the main goals of choosing Kafka as the transport layer, and Streams are needed in order to achieve it.
We learn the basics about Kafka Streams, Topologies, KStream and KTables, as I mentioned before Exactly once semantics, plus aggregations, joins and other operations supported by the High Level DSL. Examples are coded in Java (one also in Scala) and this time the author shows how to do testing of the Topologies you build.
It is indeed more advanced than the basic and Connector courses, and while the examples are nice and you get to build 3 small applications, some of the theorical explanations are a bit vage, and a few ones terrible, like what an Outer Join is, forcing you to go to the "related resources" (a Confluent.io blog post with a real, proper explanation) to understand them. Again you can perfectly watch it at 1.25x and will probably still skip chunks of the code walkthrough videos as the actual logic is quite small and the configuration changes (e.g. to activate idempotency at Producers, or exactly once behaviour at the streams) are just a few.
If you grab the course with a discount is fine, but at the full price displayed at Udemy (100€) feels pricey.
Continuing with my basic learning of Apache Kafka, and after the introductory course, I've recently finished also the second course in the series, Kafka Connect Hands-on Learning. Where the first one introduced the basics of producers, consumers, workers, topics, etc., here we learn about Source Connectors (inputs), Sink Connectors (outputs), what is a Kafka Connect Cluster, how to write your own connectors and how to deploy them.
The course has practical examples: Reading real-time Tweets into Kafka topics using a source connector, transform data from Kafka into Elasticsearch via a sink connector, and writing a connector that hooks into GitHub. Oh, and how to use the REST API to manage the connectors and their configurations.
Short one (4 hours, which easily you can follow at 1.25x speed) but well explained, with clear diagrams and interesting examples.
Master 320 Common English Phrases teaches some useful sentences for 16 scenarios: on phone calls, shopping, scheduling a meeting, etc. It does so providing videos with the sentences, then audios with full dialogs using those sentences, and then with some gap-filling exercises for you to print and complete.
While the speaker is too slow in the speaking, taking too long breaks between repeating the sentences, other than that it is a short but very practical course.
Doing some research for a work-related task, I needed to learn the basics of Kafka, so I tried a visual approach instead of just reading some tutorials or a book (which takes more than a few hours). Learn Apache Kafka for Beginners is an introductory course that lasts between 3 and 4 hours, depending on if you use Java, Scala, Akka or similar or not, as you will skip the corresponding videos demoing basic consumer-producer examples.
You will learn the basics of Kafka: How it works, producers, consumers, topics, partitions, offsets, segments, basic setup and configuration (including a handy Docker small cluster for local development), and some tips and advices regarding how to properly configure everything. Considering that it also has coding demos, while a small course the content is fine and very well summarized and presented.
There are other more advanced courses (which I'll probably take), regarding Streams, Connectors and other non-trivial areas.
An insightful introduction, recommended.
More english study "results", another course done at Udemy, this time "Master 120 common phrasal verbs".
As the course title suggests, you get to learn 120 common phrasal verbs, not more, not less. How to use them in conversations, how they're written, and some exercises.
I liked about the course that you get to see the typical way you'd thought the sentence is written, then it gets corrected to the phrasal verb version. Some were common but others I didn't knew about them so I'm glad I did this (short) course.