Chapter 1. Introduction and General Principles

The aim of this book is to provide you, the Talend developer, with a set of common (and sometimes not so common) tasks and examples that, we hope, will help you in:

• Developing Talend jobs more rapidly
• Solving Talend issues more quickly
• Gaining a wider knowledge of the Talend product
• Gaining a better understanding of the capabilities of Talend

This cookbook is primarily intended as a reference guide, however, the chapters have been organized in such a way that it can also be used as a means of rapidly developing your Talend skills by working through the exercises in sequence from front to back.

For the more experienced developers, some of the recipes in this book may seem very simple, because they describe a feature of Talend that you may already know, but we are hoping that this isn't the case for everyone, and that there will be something in the book for developers of all levels of experience.

Many of the recipes in the book require you to complete sections of a partially built job, so it is assumed that in the real world you would be able to get to the starting point independently. Our thinking behind this is that we wanted to squeeze in as many recipes in the book as possible, so only the relevant steps that need to be performed and understood for a particular point to be made, are described in detail within each recipe.

Many any of the examples will write their output to the Talend log/console window when we could easily have written the data out to files or tables. However, the decision was made to provide an easy means (in most cases) of viewing the results of an exercise without having to leave the studio.