You can prepare for the AWS Certified Data Engineer Associate with one exam book, but only if you also study what AWS added to DEA-C01 in December 2025. Both publisher-backed DEA-C01 study guides predate that revision. Sybex has none of the Iceberg, vector, LLM or SageMaker Catalog skills. O’Reilly covers SageMaker Catalog and S3 Tables, but not vector indexes or LLM integration.
You will find seven AWS data engineer books below: the Sybex and O’Reilly DEA-C01 study guides, then hands-on books on AWS Glue, Redshift and data pipeline design that fill the gaps. Each pick tells you which chapters to read for each domain and which skills it misses. I last checked the DEA-C01 code, its exam guide revisions and every Amazon listing in November 2026 against the live AWS certification page and Amazon’s US catalog.
Confirm the DEA-C01 version first
DEA-C01 is still the only Data Engineer Associate exam, and AWS has announced no DEA-C02, no beta and no retirement date. The AWS certification page lists DEA-C01 with no notice banner, and the September and October 2026 announcements from AWS Training and Certification cover only MLA-C02, DVA-C03 and SAP-C03. This matters for the books, because every DEA-C01 title is still current, which is not true of the SysOps books that were written for SOA-C02.
Before you buy anything, compare your plan with what the current DEA-C01 exam guide says you will sit:
| Item | DEA-C01 today |
|---|---|
| Questions | 65 (50 scored, 15 unscored) |
| Time and cost | 130 minutes, 150 USD |
| Passing score | 720 on a 100 to 1,000 scale |
| Domain 1: Data Ingestion and Transformation | 34% |
| Domain 2: Data Store Management | 26% |
| Domain 3: Data Operations and Support | 22% |
| Domain 4: Data Security and Governance | 18% |
| Exam guide version | 1.1, published December 12, 2025 |
Ingestion and storage together are 60% of the score, so those chapters deserve most of your reading time. Version 1.1 kept the code and the domain weights but added skills. The DEA-C01 revisions page names each one:
- Integrate large language models into data processing (skill 1.2.10).
- Manage open table formats such as Apache Iceberg (2.1.7).
- Describe vector index types, HNSW and IVF, and vectorization with Amazon Bedrock knowledge bases (2.1.8, 2.4.6).
- Create business data catalogs in Amazon SageMaker Catalog and manage access through its projects (2.2.6, 4.5.6).
- Use domains, domain units and projects in SageMaker Unified Studio (4.1.7).
- Describe governance frameworks and data sharing patterns (4.5.7).
Version 1.1 also added Amazon Aurora, Amazon Q, Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Kendra, AWS Data Exchange and Amazon S3 Tables to the in-scope services, and removed AWS Cloud9, AWS CodeCommit and the AWS Schema Conversion Tool. No exam guide on this list was written against version 1.1, although the O’Reilly guide gets closest with a closing chapter on the SageMaker and S3 Tables features. Plan to study the vector and LLM skills from the AWS documentation in any case, and use your books for the rest of DEA-C01.
Choose books by the gap you have
AWS recommends two to three years of data engineering work and one to two years of hands-on AWS before you sit DEA-C01. Most candidates are short on one of the two, and that decides which second book you buy. Work through these choices in order:
- To cover the original DEA-C01 objectives with the most practice questions, start with the Sybex study guide (pick 1) for its five practice exams. Choose the O’Reilly guide (pick 2) instead if you care more about the version 1.1 topics than about practice volume.
- If you know data engineering but not AWS, add Data Engineering with AWS (pick 3) to learn how the services fit into one pipeline.
- If you know AWS but have never built a pipeline, read Fundamentals of Data Engineering (pick 7) before you open an exam guide.
- To practise in a real account, pick one cookbook: the Data Engineering with AWS Cookbook (pick 4) for the whole platform or the Amazon Redshift Cookbook (pick 6) for the warehouse.
- To go deeper on Iceberg and the Glue Data Catalog than either exam guide does, use the Glue book (pick 5), which is the only one printed in 2026.
Two books is the right budget for most people: one exam guide and one book for the gap you named above. Buying all seven duplicates a lot of Glue and Redshift material, and DEA-C01 rewards hands-on time in a test account more than a third read of the same service.
Compare the seven books
Prices are the Amazon US prices returned by Amazon’s catalog API on November 4, 2026, and they move often. Use the table to shortlist, then read the pick for the chapter map.
| Book | Printed | Pages | Practice exams | Best for | Price seen |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Sybex DEA-C01 Study Guide | Mar 2025 | 656 | 5 online exams, 100 flashcards | Full objective coverage | $49 |
| 2. O’Reilly DEA Study Guide | Sep 2025 | 473 | Chapter questions + 1 practice exam | Version 1.1 topics, shorter read | $40 |
| 3. Data Engineering with AWS, 2nd Ed. | Oct 2023 | 636 | None | Pipeline design on AWS | $29 |
| 4. Data Engineering with AWS Cookbook | Nov 2024 | 528 | None | Hands-on recipes | $51 |
| 5. Serverless ETL and Analytics with AWS Glue, 2nd Ed. | Aug 2026 | 532 | None | Glue, Iceberg, Lake Formation | $50 |
| 6. Amazon Redshift Cookbook, 2nd Ed. | Apr 2025 | 468 | None | Redshift and zero-ETL | $52 |
| 7. Fundamentals of Data Engineering | Jul 2022 | 447 | None | Concepts before AWS | $43 |
Only the two exam guides carry practice questions: Sybex has five online exams and 100 flashcards, and O’Reilly has one practice exam in the book plus questions after each domain chapter. If you want more timed practice than that, pair any other pick with the official practice question set on AWS Skill Builder.
1. AWS Certified Data Engineer Study Guide: Associate (DEA-C01)
Buy this one first if you are buying one book. A team of five AWS analytics specialists wrote it for DEA-C01, and Wiley states it covers every DEA-C01 objective.
The 13 chapters follow a pipeline from source to governance, which makes it easy to map to the four domains. Read them in this order so your time follows the domain weights:
- For Domain 1 (34%), read chapters 1 to 3: Kinesis Data Streams, Firehose, Managed Service for Apache Flink, MSK, DMS, then Step Functions, MWAA and Glue workflows, then transformation with Glue, EMR, Athena and Glue Data Quality.
- For Domain 2 (26%), read chapters 4 to 6: storage services, Redshift distribution, WLM and data sharing, the purpose-built databases, and the Glue Data Catalog.
- For Domain 3 (22%), read chapters 7 to 9 on QuickSight, DataBrew, monitoring, auditing and troubleshooting.
- For Domain 4 (18%), read chapters 10 to 12 on Lake Formation, Secrets Manager, encryption, masking and privacy.
You also get an online package with 5 practice exams, 100 flashcards and a glossary, with one year of access after activation. That is the strongest practice set in print for DEA-C01, and it is the main reason this book ranks above the O’Reilly guide, which has one practice exam. The trade-off is age. The book came out in March 2025, nine months before exam guide version 1.1, and its table of contents has no section on Iceberg, S3 Tables or SageMaker Catalog, so you need the AWS documentation for nearly all of the version 1.1 skills.
Skip it if you have never written an ETL job, because it teaches the AWS services, not data engineering itself. It listed at $68 and sold for $49.06 when I checked. Check the current price on Amazon.
2. AWS Certified Data Engineer Associate Study Guide (O’Reilly)
O’Reilly’s guide is the newer of the two exam books, printed in September 2025, and the shorter one at 473 pages. Sakti Mishra is a data architect at AWS, and Anusha Challa brings more than 15 years of data and analytics architecture work, including guidance for hundreds of Amazon Redshift customers.
Chapters 4 to 7 follow the four DEA-C01 domains in order, from ingestion and transformation to security and governance, and each one ends with practice questions. Chapter 8 builds batch and streaming pipelines, including an S3 data lake on Apache Iceberg, and chapter 9 is a full practice exam with worked solutions in the appendix. Chapter 5 also covers table formats and expiring snapshots from open table formats, which lines up with skill 2.1.7.
The chapter that sets it apart is the last one, “What’s New in AWS for Data Engineers”, with sections on SageMaker Unified Studio, SageMaker Catalog, SageMaker Lakehouse and Amazon S3 Tables. The book came out six months after Sybex and three months before version 1.1. Even so, that chapter covers most of the new catalog and governance skills. Vector index types, Bedrock knowledge bases and LLM integration do not appear in its table of contents, so keep those on your documentation list.
- Choose it over Sybex if the version 1.1 catalog and S3 Tables skills worry you more than practice volume, or if you want a shorter read.
- Choose Sybex instead if you want five practice exams and flashcards in the same purchase.
Amazon showed it as in stock but scarce, at $39.70 against a $59.99 list price. Check the current price on Amazon.
3. Data Engineering with AWS, Second Edition
Gareth Eagar’s book is not an exam guide, and that is why it helps. It teaches you to design a pipeline on AWS from the first ingest to the dashboard, which is the reasoning the scenario questions on DEA-C01 test.
Its 17 chapters move from data management architectures through cataloging and governance, batch and streaming ingestion, transformation, orchestration, Athena and QuickSight. The later chapters on transactional data lakes and data mesh give you an early start on the open table format skill that version 1.1 added, because the hands-on work uses Athena with Apache Iceberg. Most chapters have exercises in the book’s GitHub repository.
Watch the October 2023 print date, because it is the book’s weak point. It predates SageMaker Unified Studio and S3 Tables, and there are no practice questions. Its chapter 16 lab also uses AWS CodeCommit, which version 1.1 removed from scope. Make sure you buy the second edition: the 2021 first edition (ASIN 1800560419) is still listed, and Amazon’s paperback page for the second edition is separate from its Kindle listing. The paperback sold for $29.41 against a $51.99 list price, the cheapest book here. Check the current price on Amazon.
4. Data Engineering with AWS Cookbook
You learn more for DEA-C01 by breaking a Glue job in a test account than by reading about one. This cookbook from Trâm Ngọc Phạm, Gonzalo Herreros González, Viquar Khan and Huda Nofal gives you the recipes to do that.
Across 13 chapters you work through data lake storage, cross-account sharing, Glue ingestion and transformation, and orchestration with Glue workflows, EventBridge, Step Functions and MWAA. Later chapters cover EMR Serverless and EMR on EKS, governance with DataZone and sensitive-data discovery, data quality with Glue Data Quality and Deequ, then Redshift Spectrum, WLM and the Data API. That maps closely to Domains 1, 3 and 4. Use the recipes in this order to support an exam study plan:
- To practise ingestion, run the Glue and orchestration recipes in chapters 3 and 4.
- To practise operations, run the data quality and monitoring recipes in chapters 7 and 9.
- To practise governance, run the Lake Formation sharing recipe in chapter 2 and the DataZone recipe in chapter 6.
The repository shows no Kinesis or MSK recipes, so take streaming from the Sybex book. The last three chapters cover migrations from on-premises warehouses and Hadoop, which DEA-C01 touches only lightly, so skip them unless that is your day job. It sold for $50.82. Check the current price on Amazon.
5. Serverless ETL and Analytics with AWS Glue, Second Edition
Only one book on this list was printed after exam guide version 1.1, and this is it. Packt released the second edition in August 2026, and its six authors include engineers who have supported Glue at AWS and a support engineer who works on Spark and Iceberg data lakes.
Glue shows up in every part of DEA-C01 that touches a data lake: ingestion, transformation, the Data Catalog, data quality and lineage. The book’s chapters cover ingestion from files, streams, SaaS and JDBC sources, data preparation, data layouts, metadata, security with Lake Formation, data sharing, pipeline management, monitoring and tuning. The second edition adds a dedicated open table format chapter on Iceberg, Hudi and Delta Lake, which makes it the deepest printed source for skill 2.1.7.
Because it is a Glue book, it says little about Redshift, Kinesis Data Streams or the purpose-built databases. Buy it as your second book if you already have an exam guide and want depth on the largest domain. Skip the first edition from 2022 (ASIN 1800564988), which lacks the new open table format chapter. It sold for $49.99. Check the current price on Amazon.
6. Amazon Redshift Cookbook, Second Edition
Redshift questions run through Domain 2 and Domain 3, and this cookbook from AWS analytics specialists Shruti Worlikar, Harshida Patel and Anusha Challa covers the warehouse more thoroughly than either exam guide.
The April 2025 edition has 12 chapters, including a full chapter on zero-ETL ingestion, plus loading and unloading, orchestration, platform and data authorization, performance and cost tuning, lakehouse queries and data sharing. Those are the topics behind questions on distribution styles, COPY versus federated queries, and sharing data across accounts. The recipes are in the Amazon Redshift Cookbook repository, so you can run them against Redshift Serverless in a test account and delete the workgroup afterwards.
Choose it over the Data Engineering with AWS Cookbook if Redshift is your weak area. If your work is mostly on S3 and Athena, the Glue book teaches you more of DEA-C01. It sold for $51.99. Check the current price on Amazon.
7. Fundamentals of Data Engineering
Read Joe Reis and Matt Housley’s book before an exam guide if you come to DEA-C01 from cloud operations or software development rather than from data work.
You will not find AWS services in its structure, because the book is vendor neutral. What it gives you is the data engineering lifecycle (generation, storage, ingestion, transformation and serving), plus the trade-offs between batch and streaming, warehouses and lakes, and push and pull ingestion. DEA-C01 scenario questions assume you can reason about those trade-offs, then ask which AWS service fits. It is also the best-selling book here by a wide margin, at an Amazon sales rank near 26,000 when the other six sat between about 247,000 and 2.8 million.
Skip it if you already build pipelines for a living, because the two DEA-C01 study guides teach the AWS mapping you are missing. It sold for $42.99 against a $79.99 list price. Check the current price on Amazon. The wider data engineering book list has more vendor-neutral picks if you want a second one.
Avoid listings for retired or unrelated exams
A search for DEA-C01 books on Amazon returned 182 results on November 4, 2026, and most are not worth your time. Check each listing against these points before you buy:
- Reject books for the Data Analytics Specialty (DAS-C01). AWS retired that exam, and its certification page now redirects to the main certification index.
- Check the edition. The first editions of Data Engineering with AWS (2021) and the Glue book (2022) are still for sale next to the newer ones.
- Check the binding. Packt titles often have a separate Kindle listing with its own ASIN and price, so confirm you are on the paperback page if you want print.
- Be wary of $3 to $12 self-published “study guide 2026” titles of 100 to 300 pages. The catalog lists no publisher or author credentials for most of them, and none states which version of the DEA-C01 exam guide it follows.
You can reuse the same check later. If AWS announces a DEA-C02, the revision page and the certification page will show it first, usually with a beta period before the old code retires. Until then, any book that names DEA-C01 on the cover is for the current exam.
Next steps
Once you have an exam guide and one gap book, open an AWS account just for study and set a budget alert before you run any recipe, because Redshift and EMR clusters left running cost more than the books. Then work through the version 1.1 skills from the AWS documentation in the final two weeks, when the rest of the material is already familiar.
If DEA-C01 is part of a longer AWS path, these guides cover the neighbouring exams:
- The AWS certification books by exam guide lists the current code and one book for every AWS certification.
- The Solutions Architect Associate books help if you want the broader architecture associate exam next.
- The AI Practitioner and Machine Learning Engineer books follow on naturally from the Bedrock and vector skills in version 1.1.
- The Kafka and Apache Spark books go deeper on the streaming and Spark engines behind MSK, EMR and Glue.
New to AWS altogether? Start with the Cloud Practitioner books instead, because DEA-C01 assumes you already know IAM, VPCs and S3.
