Customer Reviews

Microsoft Reporting Services in Action (In Action series)

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I found this book to have lots of information, but if you learn best by hands on examples, this is not the book for you. The author shows you a report already done and gives a quick explanation of how he got there. It is not a step-by-step type of book. As a lot of the examples shown do not have a how-to to go with it, I found this book not a good place to start. There are others that are more hands-on and step-by-step which are easier to learn from.

Having said that, if you've had some Reporting Services experience and are just looking to brush up on techniques and/or learn additional techniques, then this book will probably save you the tediousness of having to go through a step-by-step example that you have already done in the past.

The project: create a secure, distributed, Internet-facing, interactive ASP.Net reporting application for a Very Large Customer. The schedule: short. The budget: low. Amazingly, we got it done, and I credit Teo and this book with helping us meet our requirements.

The Microsoft Reporting Services 1.0 documentation is not very useful to the newcomer, and with 7 months' experience now, I can also say it's not very useful to the rising journeyman. The product is quirky, with surprising gaps and baroque security features. Without expert guidance from someone who has worked with the RS dev team I don't see how anybody would get much done with Reporting Services 1.0.

Teo Lachev worked intensively with the Microsoft dev team and the book shows it. Perhaps one of the reasons other reviews here gripe about the examples is that the most useful examples are the non-trivial ones in the second half of the book. Report authoring is the easy part! Delivering your reports to your users in the ways they demand is the hard part, and in my opinion this is where Teo's book shines.

It is no exaggeration to state that without Teo's book, and in particular his discussion of custom security extensions for Reporting Services, we would have failed to deliver the goods. But we succeeded... thanks Teo.

I purchased this book in mid-September, and my team and I refer to it constantly (now early November). The accompanying .Net project files and numerous sample reports are invaluable.

Teo's writing is easy to understand, and very thorough. We've purchased several Reporting Services books, and we use this one far and away more than all the others combined.

What's more Teo is pretty darn helpful in real-time too. I've emailed him on an issue and received an answer the same day.

I have read the other books currently available on this topic, and, although the others weren't bad, I would say this is the most useful. It's an excellent book on the Microsoft Reporting Services product. But for me, I found real value in what it can do for a software developer who wants to program RS.

Its value comes in many ways, but here are my top 2 reasons for giving this book 5 stars: First, the example programs are real world. Considering that MSRS is less than a year old, examples on how to do things are invaluable. And because the sample code covers so many of the features and benefits of Reporting Services, in no time you are up to speed and writing code.

Second, the writing style is very clear and very logical. The author gives very useful explanations throughout each topic. I was able to quickly see how easy it is to do the thing I keep hearing about: programmatically using Reporting Services. For any developer out there who is tasked with creating reports with RS like they did with the Crystal API, this book will soon become your best friend.

For developers this book provides an excellent jumpstart for creating real world projects using Reporting Services. And because the sample code is extensible, you can easily get value out of Reporting Services. I just hope the next person who plans to author a book on RS, reads this one first. It's a good thing if someone writes a book that is better than this one, more useful and more practical; but now I have a standard to measure him or her against...and the bar is high!

This book is well thought out and organized. It has many real-life examples that are easy to follow, and easy to modify into your own applications. Using this book I quickly was able to use SQL Reporting Services for my own work. It is a must-have reference for folks that need to understand and implement the many parts of Reporting Services. It has information that will give an overall understanding, and then when you are ready to actually implement a custom application it has all the steps needed, (examples, explanation, resources if more details needed). This book brought clarity to Reporting Services. I highly recommend it.

I have had the priviledge of working with Teo on client projects and am very impressed with his ability to articulate technical information succintly using practical examples and applications of its features. This book gives you the hidden auspices of MS Reporting Services that you will not find in the Product documentation. I have used the information to leverage my ability to turn around successful compeletion of key tasks very quickly. Great addition to anyone's library of useful technical resources. Thanks Teo for writing it!

For many years Microsoft Access has had an excellent report generating system. Unfortunately this was tied to the rather week Jet database engine or lately to the somewhat stripped down MSDE. The industrial grade database was SQL Server. One solution was to use an Access front end to the SQL Server database engine. While this enabled the user to write reports easily, the overall system was somewhat of a kluge. Other alternatives were, of course to take the data out of the database and then write a reporting program in some other language. All in all, getting a suitable report was somewhat of a chore.

This is really a 'how-to' book on the use of SQL Server's new Reporting Services. It is written from a standpoint of not just repeating the product documentation that comes from Microsoft, but from the view of the developer who has to implement a solution.

It used to be that a report was basically a printed document. But now, this view has changed, and Reporting Services incorporates not only printed reports, but also reports that are to be web distributed, or as the information content for an OLAP application, enterprise level reports, or subscribed reports thatt are to be distributed automatically. This should be the only reporting services book you'll need - until of course the new versions of RS become available.

This book was great for giving me a better understanding of the workings of Reporting Services. I do have one other book on RS but it did little to get me beyond the hands-on labs I'd already been through. This book takes you to the next level (and beyond) to really tap into the flexibility of RS and how to get it to do what you want. It does have a developer slant to it, but I am not a developer and was able to stay with it. It reviews the anatomy of a report and takes you through sample reports, building from simple reports to more complex ones that resemble more of what you'd find in the real world. It even talks about creating external assemblies and invoking that code from RS. It also addresses report management, security, OLAP, and performance considerations.

This book also tells you what cannot be done with RS (in this version, anyway) potentially saving me alot of time and effort in trying! I highly recommend this book I don't think I'll need another RS book until the next version comes out. Hopefully, this author will produce an updated version at that time.

This is absolutely the best book, currently available about Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services. Not only does this book teach you how to develop the reports, but it shows you in depth, how to integrate Report Services with your own applications using the internet, as well as your company's intranet. In addition, all the code in the book is available from their website and it is easy to modify and use in your own development.

The book is outstanding, much better than any of the others (and I have 5 different books).

I've been developing with Reporting Services for about 6 months now, and have been snapping up any book that comes out on the subject. This is by FAR the best technical reference yet. I'm not so much interested in creating reports as I am in integrating Reporting Services into an Enterprise application, so I'm spending a lot of time working with Security and Data Extensions, as well as looking at the best way to use RS as part of current and future applications. With this book, the author looks not only at how things work in RS, but also spends a lot of time explaining alternatives and their strengths and weaknesses with relation to the real world.

All in all, I find this to be a great book, with an emphasis on practicality, and a much more pragmatic view than a number of the others currently available.