Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services

Rating:
Summary: Excessively Basic and Poorly Layed Out
Review: This is the perfect book for your first day with SQL Reporting Services. The patient, step-by-step descriptions of setup and other processes are great -- as long as you're a new user. Once that period ends, though, you'll probably find, as I did, that the book suffers from two big problems. First, it's too basic - everything, even the advanced techniques, are described in that same step-by-step manner, which by now will seem very cumbersome. (Lest you think I'm exaggerating: in chapter 8, "Beyond Wow-Advanced Reporting", the user is still being told, in a separate, numbered instruction, to click OK after completing a series of steps.) Second, it's been layed out such that any attempt to read it as a reference -- that is, breaking out of the linear narrative of the step-by-step instructions and skimming through it looking for the one paragraph that describes how to do what you want to do -- is hampered by the needle-in-haystack problem of finding meaningful content amid all the instructions. Most tech books will indent example code so that it's easy to skip over; here, explanation, property lists and those darned steps are all just presented inside very large boxes. There is some font differentiation for SQL code, and there's tabular presentation of properties and values for you to assign, but the rest of the content is insufficiently differentiated for the book to be useful as a reference.
Because of these flaws, this book is not suitable as your only Reporting Services book. It might make a fine first book if your budget allows getting another, better one once you've progressed past the first couple chapters.