BIRT: A Field Guide to Reporting (2nd Edition) (Paperback)

~ (Author), Nola Hague (Author), Jane Tatchell (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

The world-wide developer community has downloaded over three million copies of BIRT (Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools) from the Eclipse web site. Built on the open-source Eclipse platform, BIRT is a powerful reporting system that provides an end-to-end solution, from creating and deploying reports to integrating report capabilities in enterprise applications.

The first in a two-book series about this exciting technology, BIRT, Second Edition: A Field Guide to Reporting is the authoritative guide to using BIRT Report Designer, the graphical tool that enables users of all levels to build reports, simple to sophisticated, without any programming.

BIRT, Second Edition: A Field Guide to Reporting is an essential resource for users who want to create presentation quality reports from day one. The extensive examples, step-by-step instructions, and abundant illustrations help new users develop their report design skills quickly. Power users can find the information they need to make the most of the product’s rich set of features to build complex and compelling reports. By the time you finish this book, you learn the following and more

• Design effective business and corporate reports that convey information through images, charts, tables, and cross tabs
• Build reports using data from a variety of sources, including databases, XML documents, spreadsheets, and web services
• Enliven reports with interactive features, such as hyperlinks, Tooltips, and highlighting
• Create consistently styled reports and collaborate with other report designers through the use of templates and libraries of reusable elements
• Localize reports for an international audience

This second edition, revised and expanded, adds updated examples and covers all the new and improved product features, including

• Cross tabs and OLAP cubes
• New chart types, including Gantt, bubble, tube, and cone charts
• Web services as a new data source
• New report output formats, including doc, ppt, xls, and PostScript
• The capability for reports to reference CSS
• Localization of report parameter and data values

About the Author

The authors are members of the extended BIRT development team and have backgrounds in both computer science and technical writing. Collectively, they have many years of experience in technical consulting, training, writing, and publishing about reporting, business intelligence tools, and database technologies.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 794 pages
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional; 2 edition (July 27, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0321580273
• ISBN-13: 978-0321580276
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.9 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #51,309 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars birt - a field guide: the title speaks for itself, December 30, 2006

By	Jeanne Boyarsky (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: BIRT: A Field Guide to Reporting (Paperback)

"BIRT: A Field Guide to Reporting" is a great tutorial for learning how to use BIRT. BIRT (Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools" is described including its relationship to Eclipse. After covering how to install BIRT, the book goes into great detail on how to use the report designer.

The target audience should be familiar with HTML, SQL and JavaScript as stated in the introduction. The book describes functions used, but you are expected to know the basic syntax.

As expected, the book covers how to use each of the features of BIRT. They are all described with step by step instructions. There are also a few tutorials walking you through the process from start to finish. I liked the "how to" style for tasks.

The book includes tips on how to plan a report and what to consider. It also includes common code snippets that you may want to use and lists available functions.

I was particularly impressed with the abundance of screenshots and the excellent glossary. If you are thinking about using BIRT, this book is a valuable addition to your library.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Incredible power at an exceptional price... free!, November 27, 2006

By	Thomas Duff "Duffbert" (Portland, OR United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: BIRT: A Field Guide to Reporting (Paperback)

Every once in awhile, I get to review a book on a technology or software package I've not heard of before. That was the case with BIRT: A Field Guide to Reporting by Diana Peh, Alethea Hannemann, and Nola Hague. I'm stunned at the quality and depth of this open-source Eclipse reporting tool. Oh, and the book's pretty good, too... :)

Contents:
Part 1 - Installing BIRT: Prerequisites for BIRT; Installing a BIRT Report Designer; Updating a BIRT Installation
Part 2 - Getting Started: Learning the Basics; Planning Your Report
Part 3 - Connecting to a Data Source; Retrieving Data; Binding Data
Part 4 - Designing Reports: Laying Out a Report; Displaying Text; Formatting Report Content; Sorting and Grouping Data; Aggregating Data; Writing Expressions; Filtering Data; Enabling the User to Filter Data; Building a Report That Contains Subreports; Using a Chart in a Report; Displaying Data in Charts; Laying Out and Formatting a Chart
Part 5 - Enhancing Reports: Designing a Multipage Report; Adding Interactive Viewing Features; Building a Shared Report Development Framework; Localizing Text; Glossary; Index

BIRT stands for Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools, and it runs on the Eclipse platform. Running as a plug-in or using the Rich Client Platform, BIRT will allow the user to create reports from various data sources like JDBC-enabled databases, text files, and XML files. The authors start out with the basics on how to download and install the software (it's dead simple). Then using a few tutorial exercises and plenty of screen prints, they walk you through the basics of connecting to a data source and building a report. The features available in BIRT seem endless, and I was completely amazed at the quality and depth that the software offers for both simple and complex report generation. Throughout the entire read, I kept thinking about a number of applications I wanted to try this out on. Normally to get something of this magnitude, you have to buy reporting packages that cost thousands. Peh, Hannemann, and Hague have completely twisted my world view when it comes to reporting. Great job!

The only thing that wasn't covered too much was how to roll this out to an end-user base without having to make your audience experts in Eclipse. It seems as if there must be some way to package these reports up to shield the user from the internals. There's a follow-on book that covers integration and extension of BIRT, and I'm hoping that deployment is covered more there. But that in no way takes away from the value and quality of what the authors did here...

This is subject matter that has me excited for some potentially cool applications. If things work the way I hope they will, I'll owe a debt of gratitude to this book...

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Text, November 23, 2008

By	Michael Colletti "AvidReader" - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I am not a reports guy. I have a project that I needed to get some familiarity quickly. There are great online resources from the eclipse and birt-exchange websites but I needed more depth. This text was great for that and as a desk reference. Well written and clearly presented material makes this text worthy.

I'm still not a reports guy but now at least I have a shot at getting through the project.