Microsoft Business Intelligence for Dummies 1st Edition

Easy to read, and writen for those that are not experts on BI. I used as complement to a BI trainning lead by an instructor and book helped me well as support material.

not practical much, just to pre-entry induction

Thanks!

This book came out in April 2010 and claims to be about the "latest Microsoft technologies".A mere two months later this wasn't true. The book looks at the 2007 products (came out at the very beginning of 2007) and not the 2010 products. So for instance it looks at PerformancePoint Server which as a product no longer exists having been incorporated into SharePoint Server 2010.So it's a case of a book being published far too late for most people.It's particularly cheeky of the Publishers (I don't blame the cover blurb on the author - hence the two stars not one) to make that claim about the latest Microsoft technologies when the Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 products had already been out for six months in beta and were already known to be reaching RTM in the first half of 2010.

As someone working on a Microsoft certification, I needed to gain a better understanding of Microsoft's BI technologies without having to wade through tech jargon and geek acronyms. This book was the perfect reference material for me. I love how this book's content is organized. You won't have to flounder trying to catch up. The beginning, middle, and end approach makes the experience equal to curling up with a great book as opposed to "studying" tech reference material. Perhaps the biggest bonus for me was the section on Implementation Plan comparing waterfall and agile methodologies. Actually, scrap that. The biggest bonus for me was the author's sense of humor. I can't wait to use a bunch of funny one-liners I "stole" from the book!P.S. I started crimping pages I thought were really important and realized I was doing that every other page, so I stopped crimping and decided to just keep the book with me all the time.

I am highly impressed with the author's ability to connect the technology to the way people need to make decisions. I now feel competent to have an educated dialogue with my consultant. It is well organized, starts at the beginning and I'll keep it around as a reference as well.