1. First, go breadth-first. Read each chapter rapidly, paying particular attention to the early bits and to the rhymes. They summarize the key points.
2. Don’t forget to laugh while reading the rhymes! Seriously, pay attention to each line in the rhymes as they are particularly packed with information.
3. After you finish going through the entire book quickly, come back to the chapters that relate to your specific use cases and go through them in detail.
4. For the drills in the book, understand what step is trying to accomplish, then try it out on your own. In particular, also search for online updates for your most important use cases—the world of cloud computing and the GCP is changing incredibly fast.

There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.

CodeInText: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: "A public dataset named samples.natality is queried"

A block of code is set as follows:

#standardSQL 
SELECT 
 weight_pounds, state, year, gestation_weeks 
FROM 
 `bigquery-public-data.samples.natality` 
ORDER BY weight_pounds DESC LIMIT 10; 

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

#standardSQL 
SELECT 
 weight_pounds, state, year, gestation_weeks 
FROM 
 `bigquery-public-data.samples.natality` 
ORDER BY weight_pounds DESC LIMIT 10; 

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

curl -f -O http://repo1.maven.org/maven2/com/google/cloud/bigtable/bigtable-beam-import/1.1.2/bigtable-beam-import-1.1.2-shaded.jar

Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see onscreen. For example, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in the text like this. Here is an example: "To upload the datafile, click on the Choose file button."