I was recently asked by Packt Publishing to review Xavier Hacking and David Lai “SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards 4.0 Cookbook”. I just finished reading the book, and wanted to share some thoughts.
This is a tremendous resource for Xcelsius developers. The format of a “recipe book” is a wonderful idea, and is perfect for folks who are looking to become effective with Xcelsius very quickly, looking for a point solution to an immediate problem, or just needing some creative inspiration when working on their dashboard.
You can skim through the list of recipes and pick the ones you are interested in “cooking up”. The electronic format makes is very simple to find relevant information, rather than flipping through pages, i could use the find functionality to quickly look for a specific topic.
The recipes cover a wide array of topics, starting with topics relevant to beginners who are looking to understand fundamental best practices, to advanced users who are looking for new creative ways to extend their repertoire of Xcelsius tricks. The book covers pretty much the entire spectrum of dashboard development from components, to the model, excel, data connectivity, publishing and even third party tools. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it, and am very impressed by the breadth of coverage. This is a wonderful reference applicable to any Xcelsius developer.
The book is available in from many places on the web, the publisher’s web apge for it is at: http://www.packtpub.com/sap-businessobjects-dashboards-4-0-cookbook/book
I really liked the article, and the very cool blog