Excellent book – Pentaho 3.2 Data Integration : Beginner’s Guide

Packt Publishing has released their book on PDI – Pentaho 3.2 Data Integration : Beginner’s Guide

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.

U.S. Air Force on Social Media

The U.S. Air Force have guide for Airmen on how to, and not to, use social media. It’s an interesting document. Their guidelines are generally applicable for most organizations. I particularly like their ‘Web Posting Response Assessment’ (last page of the PDF) which is a flow chart for how, and if, to respond to a article, post, or comment online.

http://fcw.com/articles/2010/05/05/air-force-social-media-guide.aspx

The main guidance is on pages 10-15, and page 19 – the sections titled: ‘Blogging’, ‘Industry Practices’, ‘Guidelines for Popular Sites’, and ‘Top 10 Tips for Social Media’

The PDF URL is:

http://www.af.mil/shared/media/document/AFD-091210-043.pdf

Since the flow chart is Public Domain I’m including it: