Pentaho Business Analytics Cookbook

Hi,
I had the opportunity to review the book Pentaho Business Analytics Cookbook published by Packtpub. I have been delayed with this review because most of the time was consumed by the master I have been studying.

But now that I read it, these are my comments:

Pentaho Business Analytics Cookbook is a book that gives you a good overview of the Pentaho Platform, for both the enterprise and community version. For each major part of the platform, except Pentaho Data Integration and Weka, it give you a set of recipes to accomplish the most common tasks. These are the topics covered in each chapter:

• Chapter 1: Getting Familiar with Pentaho User Console
• Chapter 2: Configuring Your BA Server Instance
• Chapter 3: Defining BA Server Data Sources
• Chapter 4: Defining Business Models with the Pentaho Metadata Editor
• Chapter 5: Creating Reports Using Pentaho Interactive Reporting
• Chapter 6: Creating Analysis Reports
• Chapter 7: Creating Reports Using Pentaho Report Designer
• Chapter 8: Creating Dashboards
• Chapter 9: Scheduling Content
• Chapter 10: Working with Pentaho Mobile BI
• Chapter 11: Customizing Pentaho BA to Meet Your Business Needs

For example, in chapter 2: Configuring your BA Server Instance, the author gives you an overview of the BA Platform and recipes for managing Pentaho solution files, users and roles. These are things that every Pentaho operator should accomplish day by day.

All the recipes given are well detailed and written with proper images and steps. This is a great book if you plan to be a Pentaho devop.

From my perspective, the book allowed me to:

1. Understand what's new in Pentaho 5, how is the UI organized, how the Pentaho solution is managed on it.
2. Grasp a very good understanding of how to use Pentaho Metadata. Pentaho Metadata is a powerfull business abstraction of the physical db model, sadly I never saw a detailed guide about how to use it. The recipes given in the book are quite accurate explaining how to use it.
3. Know what is the Pentaho Interactive Reporting. As this feature is only available in the Enterprise version I have never used it.  It also give you a good understanding of how WAQR can be used.
4. See how is the Ipad mobile version of Pentaho.

It also cover some few recipes about using Saiku in Analytical Reports and CDE in Dashboard edition.

I hope this review would be useful for Pentaho newbies,

All the best,

Andres