Customer Rating:  
Summary: Confusing!
Comment: The reason for being so confusing is this book was written by so many authors, thereby the ideas presented are not coherent. This is not a learner's book, and if you're looking for one I suggest you buy Brian Larson's instead - great book, easy to follow and the author will patiently answer your inquiries regarding some minor problems.
I bought this book yesterday hoping I could supplement the things I've already learned previously regarding RS, but no, I'll return this book today and ask for a refund.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Needs stronger editing, walkthroughs hard to follow.
Comment: 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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: About Average
Comment: 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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Tough to get through
Comment: 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...
Customer Rating:
Summary: Surprisingly Disappointed
Comment: 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.
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