Streaming Analytics with IBM Streams: Analyze More, Act Faster, and Get Continuous Insights

8Getting Started

We’ve covered a lot of material in this book. In this chapter, we look at how you can get started with Streams and start putting together distributed real-time analytics solutions.

There is a lot of excellent material available on the web. The key is to use it in a way that allows for a progression from a neophyte to an expert in an orderly manner. The best way to start is to get your hands on the product and start coding. Once you get your first taste of the product, you can move on to more in-depth subjects.

This chapter covers the following subjects:

• How to get Streams

• Introductory hands-on lab

• Moving on into more in-depth learning

• Working with the Streamsdev site

• Navigating the documentation

• Other material

Note that the URL references for the material you’ll need in your learning journey are found in the appendix.

How to Get Streams

Streams can be hosted in the cloud, on a virtual machine, or on dedicated hardware. At the time of this writing, the latest available version is 4.0.1 (version 4.0, fixpack 1). It comes in multiple editions, such as:

• IBM Streams (Production)

• IBM Streams Developer Edition

• IBM Streams Quick Start Edition

Note that, although there are cloud deployment options, as mentioned above, an easier way to get started with Streams is to use the Quick Start Edition VMware image.

The Quick Start Edition is available as a free download from the IBM web site¹. It is available as a software download or as an already-installed product ...