demo-scene VS kafka-connect-twitter

Here’s a great place to dig into things: https://developer.confluent.io

Once you’ve decided on a language to focus on, it’s time to start filling those knowledge gaps. Don’t be discouraged by this step. We all have knowledge gaps, and filling them can be very rewarding. First, you’ll want to make sure you have a good understanding of Kafka basics. Fortunately, there are many resources to help you with this. A web search will turn up many great books and other resources. And, of course, Confluent Developer offers interactive courses ranging from introductory (Apache Kafka 101) to advanced (Kafka Internals), full documentation, and other content to help you get started.

Confluent Developer: Learn Apache Kafka through Confluent Developer tutorials, documentation, courses, blog posts, and examples.

Spend some time on https://developer.confluent.io , especially https://developer.confluent.io/get-started/java/ and look at https://github.com/confluentinc/examples . Those will give really practical examples for how to set up your configs and start consuming

FWIW you'll find a bunch of promo codes over at developer.confluent.io

Kafka streams is a Java library built on the producer/consumer APIs designed to create event-driven microservices on top of Kafka. In general, I recommend exploring https://developer.confluent.io to learn more

For example: https://github.com/confluentinc/demo-scene/tree/master/kafka-connect-zero-to-hero

should I be reading a different material for a first Kafka project and working with a different kind of setup? Now, I can't be unbiased on this one ;) One of the things we're doing with Confluent Developer is to try and create a resource for people to learn Kafka from the ground up, whether they ultimately decide to pursue it on Confluent or not. The fundamentals of Kafka that you'll be learning are going to be as applicable whether you're using Apache Kafka self-managed, or Confluent, or AWS' MSK, or whatever else. Personally I'd this stage I'd use whatever setup you find easiest and least friction to your learning journey. As u/louisvell mentioned, /u/stephanemaarek's courses on Udemy are also very popular, if you wanted a "second opinion" on how to approach learning Kafka.

https://developer.confluent.io they’ve thought about this question very deeply

I'm reading O'Reilly's "Mastering Kafka Streams and ksqlDB" to start learning Kafka, it was suggested for me on an ad by Confluent. Unsurprisingly it uses Confluent's software throughout the book. One of the first projects is a simple app that does sentiment analysis on tweets. The book uses kafka-console-producer and a sample .json file for the tweets, but for my app I wanted to read actual tweets. To do that I've been reading about Kafka Connect and looking at this repository, but I'm having a hard time understating how to best deploy this for my local setup. So far I've been using docker-compose.yml files provided by the book, which in turn uses Confluent's docker images for kafka, zookeeper, etc. As for this Twitter Connect repository, it seems the recommended way of setting it up is to use Confluent's platform and its CLI tool to automagically install it, which is fine, but I wanted to learn how things work under the hood (to some extend) and if possible not rely so heavily upon Confluent's software. Is it a good idea to just stick with Confluent and the book, or should I be reading a different material for a first Kafka project and working with a different kind of setup? Perhaps I'm getting ahead of myself trying to use Kafka Connect at this point?