María Carina started writing her first books for Kettle (aka Pentaho Data Integration or PDI) beginners almost 10 years ago. Since then, the Kettle project and its community have been growing quickly and certainly; since those early days, the number of possibilities with the tool have been exploding. In certain ways, the graphical user interfaces have become much better, but the sheer power of doing all sorts of complex data integration tasks can been daunting to people who are just getting started. Books like the one you're reading now are excellent in giving you a leg up.

We also need books like this one because the world of information technology is changing ever faster in directions we scarcely could have predicted a decade ago. Cloud, big data, Streaming, NoSQL, the technological evolutions seem to come faster and faster, and the data contained in it needs to get integrated somehow. This book will get you closer to solving gnarly problems a lot faster.

Kettle is a tool with very few limitations living on the bleeding edge of a lot of technologies, and people have been telling me over the years how liberating that is as compared to other software that constantly needs to tell you how to accomplish certain tasks. This freedom is meant to allow us to do complex data integration work and never get stuck and always find a way to get the job done, no matter how hard that is. With this book, getting started in this complexity is not daunting anymore; it's fun. I'm so very happy that María Carina decided to write this book, and I'm wishing you a lot of fun on the path to success that she's putting you on.

Matt Casters Kettle project founder Chief Solutions Architect at Neo4j