Books

Master the technical and soft skills you need to succeed as an IT Help Desk expert — complete with lessons, practice, and real examples.

Markets are not static rows. This book shows how to turn fragmented public and private evidence into an answerable, versioned map of who exists, who fits, why now, and who to contact—without hiding uncertainty, provenance, or change.

The behavioral interview is where senior data offers are won, lost, and leveled — and it's the round engineers prepare for least. This book turns your real career into answers that survive any follow-up: 7 competencies, 300+ real questions, company playbooks, 30 scored mock interviews, and AI-assisted preparation — built specifically for data engineers and architects.

PyTorch Deep Dive is a practical guide to mastering modern deep learning with PyTorch. From core concepts to advanced topics like transformers, diffusion models, and production deployment, it combines clear explanations, hands-on examples, and real-world best practices to help you build and scale AI applications with confidence.

Move beyond the API. Dismantle the AI black box and build generative engines from scratch with pure Python and NumPy. Master the profound geometric principles and applied mathematics driving LLMs and Transformers. Transform from a mere consumer into an elite AI innovator by writing the core mathematical architecture yourself—no shortcuts, no frameworks, just pure engineering excellence.

Data platform interviews test CDC, streaming, warehouse modeling, and trade-offs two levels deep — no generic system-design book covers it. This one does: 50 full mock interviews, 122 rapid-fire Q&A, and the framework that turns a vague prompt into a hire.

ES|QL is a fresh, piped language with its own compute engine, built for the way people actually think. You start with a source, then chain small, clear steps with a single pipe, just like you would at a command line. Filter, transform, aggregate, search, enrich, and rank, all in one easy-to-read line that goes from top to bottom like a sentence.

Behind every secure network lies an unbreakable mathematical truth. 'The Guardian Algorithms' bridges the gap between pure math and cutting-edge cyber defense. Step into the mind of a digital architect to decode the formulas that outsmart hackers, lock down infrastructure, and rewrite the rules of modern warfare. The future of security isn't coded—it is calculated.

Unlock the secrets of artificial intelligence by mastering its core foundation. This practical guide teaches you how to design, code, and optimize neural networks from the ground up without relying on complex libraries. It is the ultimate resource for developers ready to truly understand the math and logic behind the code.

Today, AI and machine learning are driven by statistical thinking. As many leading experts emphasize, without a solid understanding of statistics, you cannot truly understand, evaluate, or safely use AI. This book gives you that edge.

What's inside:33 ranked optimization patterns from foundational table design through advanced governance. A complete partition and clustering playbook with six Tier 1 patterns.Shuffle reduction techniques built around five patterns that eliminate the most expensive operations. The On-Demand vs Reservations decision framework with diagnostic SQL.A full Guardrails Playbook 

RAG, Agent Bricks, the Multi-Agent Supervisor with MCP, Lakebase, MLflow 3, Lakehouse Monitoring, Feature Store, Vector Search. Every AI surface Databricks shipped at GA in 2025 and 2026, taught by a practitioner, current to 2026. What you will learn - Build RAG pipelines with Vector Search, embedding models, and citation grounding- Ship Agent Bricks for classification and information extraction- Orchestrate specialist agents with the Multi-Agent Supervisor and MCP- Use Lakebase as the operational Postgres layer for AI apps and agents- Detect data and model drift with Lakehouse Monitoring; wire alerts to retraining- Manage the ML lifecycle with MLflow 3 and the UC Model Registry- Govern features across training and serving with Feature Store (offline + online)- Serve foundation and custom models with AI Gateway controls Who this book is for Data engineers, ML engineers, and AI/ML architects who know PySpark and the Databricks platform and now need to ship production AI. Volume 3 is the recommended prerequisite. Table of Contents 1. Databricks SQL in Production. Warehouses, materialized views, three latency signals (admission, compilation, execution), the full dashboard backend wiring.2. External BI: Tableau, Power BI, dbt. Performance tips that take a dashboard from sluggish to instant, dbt configuration at incremental scale, the seam between BI and the lakehouse.3. AI/BI Dashboards. Anatomy of a Lakeview dashboard, draft vs published flow, the Dashboard Agent's reliable patterns, the five-grant permission model.4. Genie: Natural-Language Analytics. Grounding sources, the priority rule, the SQL Genie actually writes, the questions Genie answers cleanly versus the ones that confuse it.5. AI SQL Functions. ai_query, ai_parse_document, ai_extract for PDFs and HTML, univariate forecasts, the daily cost math for production AI SQL pipelines.6. Model Serving. Endpoints, the three fields that decide capacity and cost, the chat-completion payload, the five moving pieces of a production recommender.7. Foundation Models. Five major providers, the External Models config, the vendor-swap pattern (Claude to Gemini in hours, not weeks), the three habits that keep swap cost low.8. Vector Search and RAG. Six delta-sync arguments, three chunking strategies compared, the RAG function your app imports, end-to-end answer evaluation with traces.9. MLflow 3 and UC Model Registry. Versions, aliases, tags (and what each is not for), five tracking calls and what each one writes, the experiment-to-production lifecycle.10. Feature Store. Why SDP is the right producer, the six-file project layout, four parity-failure classes between offline and online stores and what causes each.11. MLOps as a Practice. Seven sources every incident reads from, three deploy patterns (canary, shadow, blue-green), three retrain strategies, five golden signals for an ML endpoint.12. Lakehouse Monitoring: Drift Detection. Six monitor parameters, the loop from drift alert to retraining, what to do when the baseline table is missing.13. Distributed Deep Learning. Three signals that force distributed training, picking the flavor (data, model, hybrid) from the bottleneck, four pieces of GPU memory worked out for a 7B model.14. Agent Bricks. Declarative classification and information-extraction agents, eval-set ingredients, the pre-compute pattern that makes small seed sets work.15. Multi-Agent Supervisor and MCP. The supervisor build, synthetic-turn evaluation, three real conversations end to end, the auth-passthrough chain across child agents.16. Lakebase: Operational Postgres for AI. Five alternatives compared, sub-10ms reads for AI apps, the lineage from Delta source through SDP into Postgres and onward to the endpoint.17. Capstone: Retail Intelligence App. Ten stages, each anchored to an earlier chapter. The smoke test that confirms every stage of the platform is reachable, the new-data path through the recommender.18. Certification and What's Next. The certification paths that actually map to the book, and the reading list the on-call team uses when something breaks.

The Databricks platform and data-engineering playbook for the engineers who own pipelines, govern catalogs, and keep workloads on schedule. Sixteen chapters on Unity Catalog, Lakeflow, identity, observability, and performance. Azure examples; concepts mapped to AWS and GCP.

Structured Streaming, MLlib, GraphFrames, performance tuning, testing and CI, and the lakehouse. Eleven chapters that take a competent PySpark user from "the job runs" to "the on-call team trusts the job.

PySpark from page one. Ten chapters that take a Python user who knows pandas and turn them into someone who can write, read, and debug production PySpark, without a three-chapter detour through distributed-computing theory.