Customer Reviews

SAP BW Professional

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I'm glad that I didn't read all of the other reviews here before buying this book from sap press. I think the negative ones might have scared me away... We are anew BW implementation so in the last few months we have been collecting every book and training resource we could find to help bring about 14 people up to speed. I agree with many of the comments that other people have made here, especially about the screen shots being too small. but I wanted to add my own 2 cents so that people read this info in the right context. First, most of the other books we bought don't have enough screen shots at all. Second, most of the other books are much more outdated (this one is from '04) - covers up to 3.1. All the books, including this one, don't go into enough detail, but I found that at least with the BW professional book there's enough meat to help give you a good general understanding of how things work and enough technical details to teach you the basics. I we were more experienced, I think we could even get more out of it, and hopefully we will in the next few months. So, overall - there are some shortcomings, but that seems to be the case for all the BW books on the market. For $70, i really don't see how anyone could not get good value from this. We do have other sap press books that are better than this one (some of them are truly exceptional) but i've talked with the other guys and girls on the team and even with the faults we agree that it's still the best BW book we have seen yet. I think they are releasing some new books on 3.5 later this year.

I read the reviews... some positive and some negative, but I decided to buy it even though it had several poor reviews. It was a mistake.

The book has very little theory, just a whole lot or screen shots that you need a magnifying glass to read. Looks like the author just gathered together some documentation from one of his projects or something.

I'm a certified ABAP consultant with over 5 years of SAP experience, so I know my way around SAP fairly well. But I was really confused after reading this book. I didn't find it helpfull at all, and I probably won't waste my time trying to finish it.

Some SAP-Press books are really good, like the HR book and the Worlflow book. But keep your money and don't buy this one.

While the book has considerable content, the author does an exceptionally poor job of introducing basic concepts and seems to have a problem with basic English grammar.

An example: In the "SAP Business Information Warehouse - Overview" section, which supposedly introduces the reader to an overview of SAP BW, under a side heading of "InfoObjects as InfoProviders", you have the following:

Master-data-bearing characteristics as InfoProviders provide reporting with the master data tables of the attributes and texts of the particular characteristics involved".

Besides the fact that this sentence does not make grammatical sense, no attempt has been made to previously define 'master-data-bearing', or to define what master data tables are. It is anyone's guess as to what 'particular characteristics' he is talking about! It also doesn't seem to make sense to have this sentence under a heading of "InfoObjects as InfoProviders"!

Unfortunately, this is not an isolated example! Two sentences before this one reads "Why would you use ODS objects despite all their problems? Because it makes sense to store data at the document level in ODS objects if you think of this storage as a kind of archive that can be directly accessed with key fields that lead to it directly, such as "document number" or "item number." (sic) However, mapping the last requirement with InfoCubes (with line items) offers better performance.

Forgive my ignorance here, but what the hell is the "last requirement" referring to in this sentence?

My advice - Avoid this book!!! For someone who attempts to use this as an introduction to SAP BW it is unreadable and I would imagine that the appalling grammar would make it barely readable for someone who DOES know SAP BW!

I bought another book on BW before this one and the problem was that it was all about how BW can do all this great stuff, but it didn't really teach you how to actually do anything. This book explains the big picture but then it shows you the actual steps with screen shots and so on. Wordy in a few spots, but mostly it gets right to the point. Would be worth double the price... A good book for people who want to really master the functions of BW.

It is a good book but you need to have BW Access to understand the screenshots since they are very light and small print. These need to be made bold and enlarged otherwise the book is good for beginers and most of the book is on reporting and not Extractions.

I buy every new book about SAP BW in the last years and this one is the best so far. Lots of tips that I not find in other books and they explain why you should do something, not only how. I think the realy good part also is organisation of the sections and because they has screen shots and grphic on most every page. Too bad for sure they didn't include release 3.5 - but for today this book is the best one you can find.

I thought this book was awful. Despite whatever the author(s) might indicate in the preface, I don't feel that there is any target group that would benefit from an attempt to churn through this. Most of the content is scattershooting at best and there is little in the way of foundation for those who are new to BW. All in all, I thought this book [was bad]! I was very excited to step in and really learn BW, but I will have to try and find this information elsewhere.

This book as reference about modeling techniques is good (but not if you try to see a deeper technical stuff), but if you are finding a true guidelines for modeling with SAP BW, it not good enough. Exists a lot of good technical reference about multidimensional modeling. When I bought this book if get it supposing in it I will find more advices, recommendations and considerations about how I will represent the modeling requirements directly to analyze, identify all the tools contained in the SAP BW system, but it wasn't. It shows examples about the objects required for specific busness scenario, but never gives the advices to how to build new ones. The "golden rules" doesn't exist in this book. Is much better and preferable take the design & optimization course instead this book.

[...]This book is usefull to a level, but over all rating is not good. The screen shots are terrible. The screen shots are referenced in many places and it is very difficult to read the contents of the screen shot. I'm surprised they even published this book without reviewing it properly. There are some positive things though

Good book for someone new in the filed to understand BW and step by step process to build the system