Kafka Stream Processing

This is a solid reference for working with Kafka in production. It covers the fundamentals you actually need: producers, consumers, Kafka Streams for stateful processing, and schema registry integration. The partition and task model explanations are clear, especially the bit about how your parallelism is bounded by partition count. It walks through the three delivery semantics (at-least-once, at-most-once, exactly-once) with practical tradeoffs instead of just theory. Good for building event-driven systems, real-time pipelines, or when you need guaranteed message delivery across distributed services. The production deployment patterns are here too, which is often where Kafka tutorials fall short.