Reviews for Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services for Dummies

1. Do not purchase this book

   Rated 1 out of 5 stars, August 12th, 2008

   This book is terrible.........I am so glad I purchased it second hand for a few quid.
   
   It is riddled with typos, screen shot references that do not tie up and so on.....it really is a bad book.....
   
   As it is a dummies book, you would be purchasing it to "get to know" the systems......well, you won't, there are plenty of better info sites on the internet !
   
   DO NOT PURCHASE THIS BOOK !

2. Better than nothing I suppose

   Rated 1 out of 5 stars, August 12th, 2007

   I got this book since I needed to learn SQL Server Reporting Services for my work, and I assumed that the 'For Dummies' series would be a reliable place to start. I'm sure there's a good book in here, trying to come out, but the whole thing is let down quite dramatically by several basic flaws. Firstly, don't be fooled by the 'for Dummies' bit: the amount of jargon that you are assumed to understand is enormous, and I don't want to count the number of times I ended up just clicking around on everything until the right menu box came up. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, the book starts to fall apart after a couple of chapters - not literally, but editorially. Whole paragraphs go missing, screenshots don't even remotely tie up with the text, steps vanish so that exercises become impossible, and so on. My favourite is where you are told to start with a query, and the screenshot is of a part of the screen that doesn't include the query, so you have no hope of making any sense of the rest of the chapter! Plus, don't be fooled by the mention of a 'dash of humor and fun': the only slight bit of humour was a reference to David Letterman. Ho ho ho. The only reason for one star is that SQL Server Reporting Services is so horrendously designed that, without some sort of book to help, I'd be lost; but any other book must surely be better than this one...