I was asked to review a new BIRT book by John Ward titled, Practical Data Analysis and Reporting with BIRT. This was a book that I had already downloaded and intended to read as mentioned in a previous post. As I started reading the book, I realized that this was a great introductory BIRT book. For that reason, I decided to have a new employee, who needed to get up to speed with BIRT quickly, use this book as his first training exercise.
His overall impression was good and he thought this book was a nice starting point for a new BIRT user. When asked to rate this book from 1-10 on how well the book did for training a new user, he assigned this book an 8 out of 10. Below are a few relevant notes by chapter that were made while going through the book.
Chapter 1 - Introduction
Good introduction to Business Intelligence, where BIRT came from, and what it is.
Chapter 2 - Installing BIRT
This chapter contains easy to follow instructions for installing BIRT using several different methods.
Chapter 3 - The BIRT Environment and Your First Report
The author does a good job of showing readers what BIRT can do/give them in a report. The description of the Report Designer window is a bit confusing as you cannot see anything the author describes until after you have created a report. It might be better to create the report first and then go back and read the designer description.
Chapter 4 - Visual Report Components
Nice use of examples to show basic visual design components for reports. The chapter is also a very helpful introduction to some of the basic tools of BIRT.
Chapter 5 - Working with Data
This was a great chapter on BIRT Data Sources however some of the XML or report design examples talked about in this chapter assume you have these files. As a result, I had to type up the sample XML and flat files examples in order to complete the steps.
Chapter 6 - Report Parameters
Some confusion with the screenshot in step 7 of Cascading Parameters. This picture/figure looks like it belongs with step 12, where it also appears. Other than that little confusion, the author offers pretty straightforward examples for new users of BIRT related to parameters.
Chapter 7 - Report Projects and Libraries
Couldn’t do shared report example under Other Project Options as I don’t have a username and password authentication to a CVS server, so had to skip that part. Otherwise, good information on BIRT report projects and libraries.
Chapter 8 - Styles, Themes, and Templates
Good informative examples of how to create custom styles for your reports to make them unique to your company and fairly straightforward examples of templates, styles, and themes.
Chapter 9 - Charts, Hyperlinks, and Drill-Downs
Nice, simple charting, hyperlink, and drill-through examples. In this chapter, the author seemed to assume that the reader has totally grasped everything that was previously mentioned as some of the step details weren’t explained as well.. I found myself going back to previous chapters to remind myself how to do some things.
Chapter 10 - Scripting and Event Handling
I had some trouble with scripting in this chapter and couldn’t get the sorting script to work. The rest of the Javascript examples worked fine. I also had a bit of a problem with the Java objects event handler example. It could have been related to a typo or something similar since I had to type the Java code from reading the book.
Chapter 11 - Deployment
Good short examples/explanations of deployment options with BIRT and their versatility. This chapter shows how to deploy with the BIRT Viewer, running from the command line, and using the Report Engine API. I really wish I could have downloaded some of these examples instead of typing them.
Chapter 12 - Practical Example
Nice in-depth example of how BIRT can be used in real world applications. I didn’t actually do this example since I didn’t have Bugzilla or MySQL installed, but I understood the example from what I could read.
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