“Extreme DAX” by Michiel Rozema, Madzy Stikkelorum and Henk Vlootman
Continuing my series of not-reviews of the latest Power BI-related books (and there are fewer and fewer of them being published) that I receive free copies of, here’s the second edition of a book that for some reason I missed first time around: “Extreme DAX”. The first few chapters cover familiar territory: data modelling, calculated columns, measures, time intelligence calculations etc. Of course there are several other books available that explain these concepts with the canonical text being “The Definitive Guide To DAX”; “Extreme DAX” does a good job with the basics and includes the latest additions to the language such as UDFs but I can’t help but think it would have been better to skip all this and assume that the reader knows it all already. Luckily things get a lot more extreme as the book progresses and it shifts to showing how to solve complex – but nevertheless real-life – Power BI problems with DAX. There’s a whole chapter on Auto-Exist for example which is pretty hardcore. For me this is where the real value of the book lies and there’s enough good content here for any advanced Power BI developer to want to buy it. Definitely worth checking out.