Overview

Apache Kafka for Beginners is the modern, hands-on introduction to real-time data streaming for developers, data engineers, and anyone starting a career in event-driven systems. Designed for 2025 and beyond, this book teaches Kafka using the technologies teams rely on today-KRaft-based clusters, Kafka Connect, Debezium CDC, Schema Registry, Kafka Streams, Apache Flink, ClickHouse, MinIO, Grafana, and Prometheus. Readers learn by building real systems, not just reading about them. Every chapter ends with a Practice Lab, guiding you step-by-step through deploying clusters, writing producers and consumers, integrating databases, building stream processors, storing analytics data, and monitoring pipeline health. A complete end-to-end real-time project is included to reinforce practical understanding. Perfect for beginners, the book starts with foundational concepts-topics, partitions, offsets, producers, consumers, delivery guarantees, and event logs-before progressing into KRaft architecture, schema evolution, CDC pipelines, stream processing, and observability. All examples use Docker, Docker Compose, and Kubernetes templates included in the appendices, enabling reproducible deployments on any machine. You will learn how to: - Deploy Kafka using KRaft mode (no ZooKeeper required) - Create reliable producers and consumers in Java, Python, and Node.js - Design schemas with Avro, JSON Schema, and Protobuf - Build real-time transformations with Kafka Streams and Apache Flink - Capture database changes using Debezium and Kafka Connect - Stream data into lakehouse and OLAP systems such as MinIO and ClickHouse - Visualize real-time metrics using Grafana - Monitor lag, replication, and cluster health with Prometheus - Troubleshoot common beginner issues using proven playbooks The book also addresses the challenges new users face most-consumer lag, rebalances, schema mismatches, CDC errors, partition imbalance, slow consumers, retention issues, and missing messages-providing clear explanations and practical fixes. Who This Book Is For - Beginners learning Kafka for the first time - Developers adopting event-driven architecture - Data engineers building real-time pipelines - DevOps engineers supporting Kafka clusters - Students preparing for data engineering roles What Makes This Book Stand Out - 100% modern, KRaft-based content - Hands-on labs in every chapter - Full-stack real-time streaming project - Reusable Docker, Compose, and Kubernetes templates - Schema Registry, CDC, Flink, ClickHouse, and Grafana included from the start - Covers real problems beginners struggle with and how to fix them Whether you are building your first Kafka pipeline or preparing for a data engineering career, this book gives you the skills and confidence to design, deploy, and operate real-time systems with modern best practices. Start your Kafka journey with a complete, updated, beginner-friendly guide engineered for real-world success.

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