Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services

I was thrown into a project with no background in MS SQL Server, or SSRS (or any BIDS really), and was able to quickly come up to speed enough to get my work done thanks to this book. The tutorials were pretty good, although I did find a few mistakes, but was able to figure it out. And good luck if you make a mistake half-way through one of the exercises and then find that the thing just won't work.I did not delve into the later chapters as they were not needed at the time -- but I'm going to keep this book handy. I would also point out that it's pretty hard learning a product like SSRS from google, so you'd be better off knuckling down and buying this book. That I have learned from experience.Note: I also purchased the Step-by-Step SSRS book from MS at the same time, but my eyes glazed over early on, and ended up using only Larson's book. Maybe the Step-by-Step book would have been more helpful if I had more time, but I was pretty desperate, and had a pretty tight deadline.

Okay much better book than the "unleashed" SAMS product. Honestly I admire someone willing to not use the MS Adventure Works and make up a database, but in reality that has good and bad things such as limited testing. In this case I have found the occasional misprint and after several relooks discovered the problem, not bad but a little annoying that I could not find a forum or link to "found mistakes" as this should be a standard in technical writing. That said, get past the sci-fi theme and the examples used were real enough for me to find practical application to the report I need to get out this week. I liked the pace and the do-it then explain in more detail. I will buy from this author again.The real reason to write this review is to back flip over the kindle app. I have read books for leisure on the Kindle but never used any of the features but more importantly never even considered this form for technical books. To learn something, I love ravaging the pages- highlighting, dog-ears, and sticky note as I go so I can find the tidbits when the need for practical application comes about in my job. Surprisingly Kindle App on pc/iPhone/ipad has been the most awesome experience for me with this book. You can highlight save text, annotate and quickly review, and see what others thought was important enough to highlight. So like a used book but new. I would sync between devices and continue working. With the kindle app on my laptop and secondary monitor attached ... i read from the laptop and worked on the second monitor. Amazing how easy this made learning and no trying to hold the page while I enter the code. The next day at work I so quickly was able find anything I had annotated or highlighted it makes no sense to me to continue other forms of reading where I can literally search for days to find that one marked text.Converted reader to the kindle app--thank you Amazon!

I am saying it's a great book for a beginner because I am not a programmer or developer. My background is on accounting and financial analysis, but wanting to learn more about Microsoft BI tools and products, one of the books I purchased was Brian Larson's book for the Reporting Services part of Microsoft BI and it's a really good book. It's a hands-on book with lots of examples and step-by-step instructions that make the learning experience very easy.At one point in the book I was having trouble connecting to the Report Manager (the web interface to post and manage your reports) and after looking on-line for a while I decided to send an email to the author, Brian Larson. I think he replied after two hours requesting more information and giving me the answer at the most two days later. I don't think support for a book can't get any better than this.The book is incredibly well written. I wish I could say the same from other BI books I've bought.

I just finished chapter 7 and decided I didn't want to wait until the end to review this book. I've done a lot of programming and reporting in Crystal but SQL Server Reporting is totally new to me. I've also gone through a lot of tutorial and reference books. This book does an excellent job of explaining everything and is quite thorough. For those who don't understand databases and SQL queries, he explains them very well. For those of us who do know them, that part can be skipped. This book is loaded with illustration and the steps are very well explained. I have it on the Kindle so this review includes the high quality for the Kindle. I highly recommend this book. At the end of each task he goes into detail about the new things learned in the task. This is great. I've learned new things about SQL queries from this as well as learning the SQL reporting.

Having read *many* texts in a long career in s/w development, this book ranks near the top in terms of accuracy, readability and content. By "accuracy", I refer to the author's painstaking, step-by-step instructions for building report after report.His technique is that of a good teacher: tell you what is about to happen, shows you how to do it, tells you what you did (and why). A few reviewers mentioned inaccuracies; I found one single mis-spelling in the entire text. At the few times I got stuck creating one of his reports, I always discovered I had simply not followed his carefully written instructions, such as when he might tell you to perform some action after right-clicking some cell, and I had right-clicked the wrong cell.I have three MCITP's in SQL Server, but SSRS was new to me. An excellent book. Have already pre-ordered the next edition.

Book requires a specific database be installed on your PC in order to follow the book. Book does not provide accurate, correct, or sufficient information to acquire this database. Therefore book is of no value to me and I cannot imagine is of value to anyone else. For those who find my review of no use, buy the book. I dare you.

Buon libro, che ti porta a scoprire via via i segreti del reporting services anche a chi è completamente a digiuno.

I bought this book because it had already received positive reviews. Having read it, I can see why. It sets out in a very clear way how to install and configure reporting services, and how to build dynamic, reponsive reports using (almost) real world examples. It's easy to follow but still covers the advanced features.The reports designer in Visual Studio takes care of a lot of the coding, formatting and grouping headaches for you. I would spend hours on coding xml/xslt to produce reports from our SQL Server, then scratch my head again looking for ways of distributing these reports to users in the way they wanted. Reporting Services with SQL Server 2008 solves all that. My boss probably thinks I'm a genius for designing this brilliant document managing system. I'd better hide this book from him.

Being new to Reporting Services I found this an excellent introduction covering the use of wizards, building reports from scratch, deployment and the reporting manager. This book is far better written than what you normally get from say Microsoft Press and the Author clearly made a huge effort in putting this book together and building up the examples from a bespoke database for a Galactic Delivery company. The book is built around working through practical examples. To be able to do this you have to download the GDS database and install it on SQL Server, which is a straight forward task. I am not surprised that this book is a best seller.

This is a very good book in a very good series (McGraw-Hill MS BI) . If you want to learn about the capabilities of SSRS and how to leverage them its recommended.I appreciate it was written a while ago and the good intentions of the author in promoting good practice (at time of writing). However the recommendation of SourceSafe as a platform to implement source code management should be ignored!Its far better than the MSPress tech book (recommended for 70-448 MCTS exam) on the BI stack and worth buying, that said it might be worth waiting for the 2012 version though (review written Jan/2012)

Quite an enjoyable reference come tutorial book. Nothing too in-depth in the book, but as I was new to reporting services I found it useful an worth the money.