Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services

SQL Server reporting services are a relatively new feature of SQL Server 2000, so I was quite excited to pick up a copy of this book. While this is a good beginning book for learning SQL and the basics of SQL Server reporting services, I have to say that I was a bit disappointed in both the presentation and depth of content this book provides. Again, this book provides some good explanation, however, the reader should be prepared for an introductory book, certainly not an advanced text. The first section of the book provides a very good introduction to SQL and SQL Server. However, this is still very introductory information, and will only be useful for very beginning readers. In fact, the author doesn¿t begin discussing the books topic until page 161. Again, this introductory information is quite necessary to understand the rest of the text, I was just hoping for a more abbreviated version of the introductory material. The rest of the book is actually much better and much more met my expectations. The author then proceeds to discuss how to generate reports. While much of the work involved in creating reports with SQL reporting services involves the use of a wizard, the author does a good job demonstrating how to expand reports beyond the default. The last section of the book goes through many of the more advanced options found in reporting services. There is a good discussion on exporting reports to different formats (including PDF, TIFF, and CSV). The final two chapters of the book are excellent, which discuss such advanced options as configuring subscriptions for reporting services and ASP.NET Code Access Security (CAS). This is really a good book, it¿s just not as advanced as I was hoping for. While it¿s certainly a valuable resource for anyone working on SQL Server reporting services, it would have been preferable if the introductory content wasn¿t quite as extensive. In spite of this complaint, I would still recommend it.