Customer Reviews

Practical Data Analysis and Reporting with BIRT

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

 

 

I thought this was a good starter book for the first time BIRT user. After reading this book myself, I used it as a quick start for someone on our team who was new to BIRT. This person spent about 3-4 days with the book and got a nice quick overview of BIRT, simple report design tasks, and some report deployment and integration options. This book doesn't do as deep of a technical dive as other BIRT books, especially around integration, but it is a nice high-level look at BIRT.

BIRT is an incredibly powerful tool to get the data out in good format. John Ward's book is an excellent primer on the capabilities and methods that make BIRT so powerful. Any powerful tool has a learning curve, and Ward makes that curve easier to negotiate.

I've been working with computers and languages for quite a while. I needed to get up to speed with the Java and web development world. Of course, the thing users want from a system are reports - getting data in is only part of the solution! BIRT supplies a tool to finish the job.

Also, thanks to the dedicated and selfless team of volunteers than built, and continue to enhance BIRT, and Actuate for supporting the free open source version. It's a great business model that enhances the product while supporting companies who need confidence in a product the opportunity to obtain that level of support. The user's group is the next line of support for new and experienced users.

The book provides a reasonable introduction into BIRT. In several sections the examples are difficult to follow. My biggest problem with this book is that it has the worse index I have seen in a technical book. I rely on the index of a book like this to be able to quickly locate the relevant pages of a particular feature that I am trying to figure out, however, this book has such a poor index that I often would look things up in the table of contents. The index is near useless which makes this book less valuable as a reference book. Overall I was not that impressed.

Overall, I thought this was a good introduction to BIRT; However, there are a few things you need to be aware of before you buy it:

1) It is a little out of date with the current version of BIRT. The book is written against version 2.1 and the version I downloaded was 2.2. Most of the differences were minor such as an option being called "Drill Through" instead of "Drill Down"; but, the example onPrepare event script in chapter 10 took me a while to get to work because of differences in the BIRT library between the two versions (FYI: I eventually figured out you need to change the imported library from "engine.api.script.element" to "model.api.simpleapi" and change the "StructureScriptAPIFactory.createSortCondition()" call to "SimpleElementFactory.getInstance().createSortCondition()").

2) The book is light on information on how to integrate and use the reports you create within a web site. In particular Chapter 11 on deployment was a little sparse on details. So if you are programmer trying to integrate BIRT reports into a web site you might need some supplemental materials.

Despite the flaws I would still recommend this book as a way to come up to speed on BIRT.

Although I've worked on Eclipse for a number of years, I never had the chance to use BIRT. When the publisher asked me to review this book on my blog (On the Data Platform), I figured it would be a great excuse to learn BIRT.

It's important to realize the this book is a quick start tutorial for BIRT for Java developers. In this capacity is serves very well, and it helped me get over the entry barrier to using BIRT.