Three New Power BI/Power Query Books

I decided to stop writing book reviews here on my blog a long time ago: it’s a lot of work to read a book and write a proper, detailed review and what’s more I don’t like the idea of writing a bad review and upsetting someone who has gone to all the effort of writing a book. That said, from time to time I get given free copies of books (which I’m always happy to receive – I like to see how other people go about explaining Power BI concepts and functionality) and in return I give the authors some free publicity here. Recently I received two copies of new books from people that I know:

Expert data modeling with Power BI, by Soheil Bakhshi (Buy it here on Amazon UK)

Soheil is an MVP whose blog I have read and admired for some time so I’m pleased to see he has written a book. It’s an important subject too: good data modelling is key to success with Power BI, and the problems of many customers I work with stem from not taking the time to learn how data should be modelled for Power BI. This book introduces you to concepts like dimensional modelling and star schemas and shows you how to build datasets that follow best practices. It also covers topics such as calculation groups and object-level security that won’t be in older books.

Power Query cookbook, by Andrea Janicijevic (Buy it here on Amazon UK)

Andrea is a colleague of mine at Microsoft and of course Power Query is a technology close to my heart. This book follows the cookbook format which teaches through a series of worked examples and easy-to-follow steps; anyone learning Power Query will find it useful to follow these recipes to get practice creating queries. I liked the inclusion of Power BI Dataflows as well as Power Query in Power BI Desktop, and again this book has the advantage of being new – it covers recently-added features such as Schema View and Diagram View in Dataflows and Query Diagnostics in Power BI Desktop that won’t be covered in other books.

There’s another book I was curious about and was lucky enough to be able to read via Microsoft’s online library for employees:

Pro Power BI theme creation, by Adam Aspin (Buy it here on Amazon UK)

When I hear someone had written a book about Power BI theme files I couldn’t believe it, but Adam is an experienced writer and has pulled it off. As you might expect it’s everything you ever wanted to learn about Power BI themes and as such, if themes are something you’re interested in you should read this book. It explains how theme files are structured, how to edit them and how the various attributes are applied to different visuals.