There’s no way I could ever pretend to be an impartial reviewer of Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari’s new book, “PowerPivot for Excel 2010: Give Your Data Meaning”. First of all, they’re good friends of mine (we wrote “Expert Cube Development with SQL Server Analysis Services 2008” together last year); and secondly, I got a freebie copy of the book. But all that aside, I do honestly think it is a really good book. Just as an example, I’ve been playing around with some DAX problems over the last few days with a view to writing a some blog posts and had been struggling to get the EARLIER function to work in the way I’d been expecting; there are only a few examples of its use on the web but I found the book had a very detailed explanation of how it works. Indeed a large part of the book is concerned with DAX and it’s probably the best resource on that subject that I’ve seen, so that’s reason enough to buy it.
It’s important to point out, though, that Marco and Alberto’s book doesn’t really go into any detail on PowerPivot for Sharepoint – there is one chapter at the end, but it’s main focus is on PowerPivot for Excel. If you want to learn more about the Sharepoint side of things I can recommend “Professional PowerPivot for Excel and Sharepoint” by Siva Harinath, Ron Pihlgren and Denny Lee (and yes, I got this book as a freebie too – it’s one of the perks of being a blogger that you get loads of free books!). There’s very little overlap between the two books – the only thing they both cover is the basic info on how to build a PowerPivot model, and that subject is so basic most people will be able to work it out for themselves – so it’s probably worth getting both if you’re serious about learning PowerPivot.
One last bit of advertising: Marco and Alberto are running a two day PowerPivot workshop in the Netherlands at the beginning of December. More details can be found here:
http://www.sqlbi.com/workshop/
