Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: Outstanding Reporting Services training book
Comment: Some reviewers are complaining that this is not a reference and that the style of this book is almost entirely to step you through one report project after another, building various kinds of reports step by step. Well this is indeed no reference, but a learning book instead! This book is perfectly learning you how to use Reporting Services. I worked through the whole book and I only had to deal with an error in chapter 8 (report TransportMonitor) and a small print error in the examples (wrong year value) which intuitively could be solved easily (often may errors in other learning guides!).
Great work and very clear explanations.
The major disadvantage: nothing about Report Data Models and the Report Builder (only something about it in Appendix D)
Customer Rating:
Summary: Well Done
Comment: Good info. Authors writing style is very good. Packed with lots of goodies. Recommend for both newbies and advanced readers.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: I too prefer the technical reference methodology
Comment: I have nearly 15 years of report writing experience using Crystal, Oracle, Access and other less common report writing tools. I need to be able to hit the index, grab a topic and run with it. For example, shading alternate rows is a fundamental report tool. However, trying to find out how to do that in 60 seconds or less was impossible with this book. Further, I found that the order in which topics was presented was a bit "interesting", considering that publishing reports was one of the first topics covered. This may be a great book, but it just didn't fit my needs.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Good introduction to Reporting Services
Comment: With the release of SQL Server 2005, many developers and business managers are clamoring to use the new features of SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services, but are unsure how to get started. This book takes the reader step-by-step through installing Reporting Services, to configuration, to generating a report, to finally customizing Reporting Services to meet a business need. This book is a good introduction to understanding what Reporting Services is all about.
This book is well organized and divided into three sections: getting Reporting Services set up, generating a report with Reporting Services, and serving up the reports you create.
The first section takes the reader through a step-by-step process of configuring Reporting Services. Additionally, the author identifies some common errors that might occur during set up and how those issues can be resolved.
The second section is (in my opinion) the most interesting of the three sections. In this section, the author illustrates how to create reports. Examples are provided which show how to generate all kinds of reports, in addition to jazzing up the end result with graphics and colors.
The final section details many of the administrative options that you should be aware of when deploying Reporting Services. In addition to some of the administrative details, the author shows how to customize reports with a style sheet and how to get the new report to integrate with a SharePoint site.
This is a very interesting book, and I would recommend it to individuals who work with SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services. There is a lot that you can do with Reporting Services, and this book goes a long way to identifying and illustrating those things.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Be Aware!
Comment: Be aware that the style of this book is almost entirely to step you through one report project after another, building various kinds of reports step by step. As such it is not useful as a technical reference whereby you can look up a topic in the index and go straight to a "how to" section relating to that topic.
If you wish to learn by completing multiple projects step by step it is fine.
I prefer a technical reference style publication.
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