10 Fantastic Books for Data Engineering: A Must-Read List

Pratik Barjatiya
3 min readMay 9, 2023

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Photo by ThisisEngineering RAEng on Unsplash

Data engineering is an essential field in the world of data science and analytics. It involves the design, creation, and maintenance of the data infrastructure that enables organizations to manage and analyze large sets of data. If you’re interested in a career in data engineering or want to deepen your knowledge of the subject, reading books can be a great way to learn.

In this blog post, we’ll take a look at ten fantastic books for data engineering that cover a range of topics from data modeling to distributed systems.

Photo by Gülfer ERGİN on Unsplash
  1. Data Modeling Made Simple” by Steve Hoberman — This book provides a practical guide to data modeling for non-technical professionals, making it an excellent resource for anyone looking to learn the basics of data modeling. It covers key concepts such as entity-relationship diagrams, normalization, and the importance of good data modeling.
  2. Designing Data-Intensive Applications” by Martin Kleppmann — This book is a comprehensive guide to building data-intensive applications that covers the principles, practices, and technologies involved in designing and building such systems. It covers topics such as distributed systems, consistency, and fault tolerance.
  3. Python for Data Analysis” by Wes McKinney — This book is a must-read for anyone working with data in Python. It covers the pandas library, which is widely used in data analysis and manipulation, and provides clear examples and tutorials to help readers get started with pandas.
  4. The Data Warehouse Toolkit” by Ralph Kimball and Margy Ross — This book is an excellent resource for anyone involved in building data warehouses. It covers the key concepts and best practices involved in building and maintaining a data warehouse, including data modeling, ETL, and dimensional modeling.
  5. Hadoop: The Definitive Guide” by Tom White — This book is an excellent resource for anyone working with Hadoop, the popular big data platform. It covers the key concepts and tools involved in working with Hadoop, including MapReduce, HDFS, and Hive.
  6. Data Science for Business” by Foster Provost and Tom Fawcett — This book is an excellent introduction to the field of data science and how it can be applied to business problems. It covers key topics such as predictive modeling, machine learning, and data mining.
  7. Clean Code” by Robert C. Martin — While not specific to data engineering, this book is an essential read for anyone involved in software development. It covers key principles of writing clean, maintainable code that is easy to read and understand.
  8. Data Science from Scratch” by Joel Grus — This book is a great resource for anyone looking to learn data science from the ground up. It covers key topics such as probability, statistics, and machine learning, and provides practical examples and tutorials to help readers get started.
  9. Data Engineering on Google Cloud Platform” by Valliappa Lakshmanan — This book is a comprehensive guide to data engineering on the Google Cloud Platform. It covers key topics such as BigQuery, Cloud Dataflow, and Cloud Storage, and provides clear examples and tutorials to help readers get started.
  10. Principles of Distributed Database Systems” by M. Tamer Özsu and Patrick Valduriez — This book is an excellent resource for anyone working with distributed database systems. It covers the key concepts and best practices involved in building and maintaining such systems, including replication, consistency, and fault tolerance.

In conclusion, these 10 books are excellent resources for anyone interested in data engineering. They cover a range of topics from data modeling to distributed systems and provide practical examples and tutorials to help readers get started. Whether you’re new to the field or looking to deepen your knowledge, these books are sure to help you on your journey.

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Pratik Barjatiya

Data Engineer | Big Data Analytics | Data Science Practitioner | MLE | Disciplined Investor | Fitness & Traveller