Customer Reviews

Professional SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This will probably be an ok reference for some things in ssrs, but otherwise it has been a real pain to get through. There seems to be a huge amount of repetitive informatin in the first three chapters before we actually get to start writing reports.

Unfortunately, once writing reports, it seems like the authors have ADD. They start talking about a walk through exercise but never actually have the walk through. They do have a couple of exercises where they show you how to go step by step, but these are not explained well.

I think the writing, other than being repetative, is sometimes unecessarily chatty, but at other times way to terse for beginners.

I have managed to glean some value from the book, but it's been tough. I would definitely recommend if you haven't touched SSRS yet to go through the tutorials on MSDN first. They do a better job of introducing you to basics, giving you plain instructions, and not overloading you with commentary that isn't all helpful in just getting you up to speed on how to create reports. Luckily I did this before I bought the book. I think if I was completely new to reporting and SSRS, I would have thrown this book down in disgust after the first 100 pages or so...

This is the fifth book that I have purchased from Wiley Publishing (WROX), and I must say that I have been very pleased so far by the overall quality of the publications until now. I read through the other four and still use each one of them as a relevant reference source.

I am half way thru this book and the experience has not been pleasant to say the least. The inconsistencies between the text, figure's and examples are to numerous to be overlooked. And, to be honest, this is one of the most confusing approaches that I have come across in quite some time. He is obvious very knowledge about SSRS, but during many of his explanations he orphans the examples or doesn't tie what he is explaining back to the example. This makes it very difficult to reproduce in the actual development environment. You're just left confused!

I am a twelve year veteran of Crystal Reports, Application Development and Database Design and I find this book very difficult to follow. So unfortunately, I would not recommend this particular book to others ... I am just surprisingly disappointed.

Till today I never found a good book in SQL Server Reporting Services. This book covers a lot of features, to get you ready to work on Complex Reports. Very good step by step instructions with working examples. It starts from a beginner level and proceeds with Advanced Report Design.The best part I liked was the explanation about Rendering reports using .NET code, .NET IO namespace classes, and URL rendering deployment strategies to handle hardware, software, and platform considerations, licensing issues, and scaling options.
I highly recomend this as a very important source to learn Reporting Services

This book does a good job of covering how to create, format, and deploy a report. But, like most books, it doesn't do a good job of talking about what to do if something doesn't work. In particular, it glosses over the security aspects of running Reporting Services. RS uses Active Directory, if you have AD installed. but the book doesn't mention AD and how the two products work together. I found that I had to use a SQL Server userid and password instead of NT security in order to get a deployed report to work. The issue has to do with the 'double hop' problem. You can get more info in the Q319723 article on Microsoft's Knowledge Base.

Almost impossible to do the walkthroughs as the writers can't decide if they are giving you instructions or just offering some general concepts. Chapters 1-3 are a waste of time. Go straight to chapter 4 to get started.

The format is too conversational and often fluffed-out with irrelevant details.

Overall, another disappointing Wrox text that has too many authors and no editor.

The first few chapters I have read of this book have been so disappointing that I'm back at Amazon looking to buy another, different book. I have some previous experience with Reporting Services so I bought a `Pro' book and jumped straight into Chapter 12 and 13 looking for the real meaty information I needed. Unfortunately this book is for beginners. The book is poorly edited - with examples containing numerous incorrect URL's and parameter names, there are pieces of information given that are just plain wrong, and most of the code examples are trivial, wasting a real pro's time - like how to populate a combobox with items or access a querystring parameter.

For me, this book is "somewhat useful" because there are not a lot of publications out there on this subject. But because I needed to "hit the ground running" and start producing reports with certain functionality right away, I've found it difficult to locate the precise information I need to accomplish a particular task. On the other hand, it appears to describe the application ad naseum, so for someone with lots of time to immerse themselves, it might be the right book.

I am a developer that has moved over from using Crystal Reports (and Enterprise v10) for 5+ years to SSRS for our new web app. We did that not only for cost (SSRS is included with the SQL Server licenses we were buying anyway and Crystal costs buku bucks), but also because we moved our product's web UI to ASP.NET 3.5, and it turns out that (as of May 2008) SAP/Business Objects has yet to release an ASP.NET 3.5-compatible SDK and the timeline is "maybe end of Q2". I'd rather have a product in hand that works than hold up development on maybe's and if's. If you're still evaluating the SSRS versus Crystal decision, I think the general consensus that SSRS is "80-90% there" is fairly accurate. But SSRS 2008 also narrows that gap.

SSRS is dramatically different in its approach to report writing than Crystal. For example, in Crystal you have defined "groups" on the page correlating to the report groups you have set up (very similar to MS Access reports). In SSRS, you have an object container (usually a table) that groups by the fields you define and then you put your objects into that object. Not better or worse... just different. This book does a good job of explaining things like that. It is also good about explaining using code in SSRS, like ability to create VB code libraries for use within reports.

I found this book to be very helpful in both outlining the basic differences as well as provide details on the nitty gritty. It's not 100% of the info you'll ever need. Frankly, I have both this and the Microsoft Press SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services book as well, and between them I can usually figure out what I need. But I also have to go and search the web for answers to specific formatting issues or resolution of "quirks". And I can't say that I've read it cover to cover. It is very well laid out along the lines of reading just what you need to read for what you're working on. If you don't care about programming report management tools, then just skip that chapter. If all you care about is management, skip the report design sections. But all-in-all I find it well laid out, clear, and if it didn't 100% explain something at least gave me enough to know where to start looking for extra detail.

If you're just a report designer, and not a programmer or DBA (I happen to be the rare exception of being all three), then you might struggle with with this book. But then again, you'll probably struggle with SSRS in general if you're only a report designer and not a coder. It's very "code-oriented". Crystal is much more report designer-friendly. But that code is also what I believe will propel SSRS to crush Crystal in the future. It provides a lot of flexibility not found in Crystal.

As a side note, after I bought this book, we decided to move all the way to SSRS 2008 despite it's "newness" and our hesitancy to use Microsoft products prior to SP-1 releases. SSRS 2008 adds quite a bit, including HTML-formatted text boxes, the ability to add rich-text to sections of text within a text box (e.g.; bold, italicize or color only one word in a sentence), as well as fix an undocumented bug with the matrix control that forces page overruns the size of the number of dynamic columns that are added (drove me crazy for a week). So I'll probably be buying the 2008 version of this book to get more up-to-date info.

To start with the first 3 chapters are a waste of time. Chapters 6 and 7, covering advanced reporting techniques should have been expanded on in detail with a step by step layout - instead we get a dumb comment - "you've learnt the details in earlier chapters (not true of the code). There is constant problems in reading the text - so much garbage and no proper highlight of key words - its impossible to race through the book, you only can trod like an old man. Unnecessary information is given that is not required. Chapter 11 - Report server configuration is at the end of the book but should be at the front - these nutters assume you are a dba when it comes to environment configuration. The book is a shambles of a layout and i give it one star for the sheer frustration it caused me - how do you learn in this condition - you waste a lot of time swearing and cursing and perfect these skills and not your reporting skills!!

This book is about average. With that I am not implying that it is a bad book but rather that you could find the same information on the Internet just by googling a little bit. I guess I was expecting to find something really clever in it, something that it would make it more useful that simple internet articles. Again, not a bad book but also not one that will make the difference.