The course begins with an introduction that provides an overview of what to expect from it. We will cover the relationship between serialization and Kafka, and the benefits it provides to the overall Kafka architecture. You will gain an understanding of the different serialization formats and the support for Schema in AVRO, Protobuf, and Thrift. You will be introduced to AVRO and why AVRO is popular to work with Kafka and Schema Registry. Further in this course, we will set up Kafka in local and produce and consume messages using Kafka Console Producer and Consumer. You will set up the base project for the greeting app, which you can use to generate Java classes from the greetings schema using the Gradle build tool. You will also understand how to set up the base project for the greeting app, which we can use to generate Java classes from the greetings schema using the Maven build tool. You will understand the different techniques of evolving a Schema with the changing business requirements. In further sections, you will code and build a Spring Boot Kafka application that exchanges the data in an AVRO format and interacts with Schema Registry for data evolution. You will also build a RESTful service to publish the events where we receive events through the REST interface and then publish them to Kafka. By the end of this course, you will have a complete understanding of how to use AVRO as a data serialization format and help you understand the evolution of data using Schema Registry. All resources and code files are placed here: https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Kafka-for-Developers---Data-Contracts-Using-Schema-Registry