Chapter 7 of Laura Funderburk’s book is where the rubber meets the road. You built a RAG pipeline in Chapter 6. Now you need to ship it. Get it out of a notebook and into something that real users can hit with HTTP requests.
You built a pipeline. It works on your machine. It runs on a schedule. Data goes in, data comes out. Ship it, right?
Chapter 1 is titled “In the Beginning” and it’s written by Rick Scavetta. He opens with a tongue-in-cheek Dickens reference, saying it’s just the best of times for data science. But to understand where we are, we need to look at where Python and R came from. Their origin stories explain why they feel so different today.
The previous chapters taught you the individual tools. Python, NiFi, Airflow, databases, data cleaning. Chapter 6 of Data Engineering with Python by Paul Crickard puts them all together into one real project.
Chapter 8 is the one where Adi Wijaya finally brings up the topic every data engineer either loves or dreads: machine learning. And honestly, he does a good job of calming down both camps. If you are excited about ML, great. If you think it has nothing to do with your job, think again. This chapter shows why ML and data engineering are way closer than most people realize.
You know that feeling when you buy fresh ingredients for dinner, and then spend 80% of your time washing, cutting, and peeling? The actual cooking takes 20 minutes. Data science is exactly like that. The cooking is the model. The prep work is this chapter.
In Part 1, we covered how Funderburk moves from Jupyter notebooks to a production-ready project structure. Docker, uv, SuperComponents, dual Elasticsearch. Now comes the part that actually tells you if your RAG pipeline is any good: systematic evaluation with RAGAS and continuous monitoring with Weights and Biases.
This is Part 2 of Chapter 5, continuing from data modeling basics.
If Part 1 was about drawing the blueprint, Part 2 is about keeping the building from falling apart. Normalization is one of those topics that sounds academic until you hit a real bug caused by duplicate data. Then it clicks fast.
The preface of “Python and R for the Modern Data Scientist” sets up the whole book in a few pages. And it does something rare for a tech book. It actually defines what it means by its own title.
I picked up “Python and R for the Modern Data Scientist” by Rick J. Scavetta and Boyan Angelov a while back. It’s an O’Reilly book from 2021, and it caught my eye because it doesn’t pick sides in the Python vs R debate. Instead, it argues you should use both.