Chapter 1, Getting Started with Pentaho Data Integration, serves as an introduction to PDI, presenting the tool. This chapter includes instructions for installing PDI and gives you the opportunity to play with the graphical designer (Spoon).
Chapter 2, Getting Started with Transformations, explains the fundamentals of working with transformations, including learning the simplest ways of transforming data and getting familiar with the process of designing, debugging, and testing a Transformation. This chapter also explains the basics of handling errors.
Chapter 3, Creating Basic Task Flows, serves as an introduction to the processes in PDI. Through the creation of simple Jobs, you will learn what Jobs are and what they are used for.
Chapter 4, Reading and Writing Files, explains how to get data from several files formats as spreadsheets, CSV files, and more. It also explains how to save data in the same kind of formats.
Chapter 5, Manipulating PDI Data and Metadata, expands the set of operations learned in the previous chapters. Besides exploring new PDI steps for data manipulation, this chapter introduces the Select Value step for manipulating metadata. It also explains how to get system information and predefined variables for being used as part of the data flow. The chapter also explains how to read and write XML and JSON structures.
Chapter 6, Controlling the Flow of Data, explains different options that PDI offers to deal with more than one stream of data: It explains how to combine and split flows of data, filter data and more.
Chapter 7, Cleansing, Validating, and Fixing Data, offers different ways for cleansing data, and also for dealing with invalid data, either by discarding it or by fixing it.
Chapter 8, Manipulating Data by Coding, explains how JavaScript and Java coding can help in the treatment of data. It shows why you may need to code inside PDI, and explains in detail how to do it.
Chapter 9, Transforming the Dataset, explains techniques for transforming the dataset as a whole; for example, aggregating data or normalizing pivoted tables.
Chapter 10, Performing Basic Operations with Databases, explains how to use PDI to work with databases. The list of topics in this chapter includes connecting to a database, previewing and getting data. It also covers other basic operations as inserting, looking up for data, and more.
Chapter 11, Loading Data Marts with PDI, explains the details about loading simple data marts. It shows how to load common types of dimensions (SCD, Junk, Time, and so on) and also different types of fact tables.
Chapter 12, Creating Portable and Reusable Transformations, explains several techniques for creating versatile transformations that can be used and reused in different scenarios or with different sets of data.
Chapter 13, Implementing Metadata Injection, explains a powerful feature of PDI, which is basically about injecting metadata into a template Transformation at runtime. Pentaho team has put in huge effort to highly support this feature in the latest PDI versions, so it's worth to explain in detail how this feature works.
Chapter 14, Creating Advanced Jobs, explains techniques for creating complex processes; for example, iterating over Jobs or manipulating lists of files for different purposes.
Chapter 15, Launching Transformations and Jobs from the Command Line, is a reference not only for running transformations from a Terminal, but also for dealing with the output of the executions.
Chapter 16, Best Practices for Designing and Deploying a PDI Project, covers the setup of a new project and also the best practices that make it easier to develop, maintain, and deploy a project in different environments.
