Category: Books

New Books: “The Definitive Guide To DAX” 3rd Edition And “Microsoft Power BI Visual Calculations”

For some reason I haven’t had any free copies of books to review recently; maybe the market for tech books has finally collapsed with AI? Books are still being published though and luckily, as someone who once published a book via an O’Reilly imprint, I have a lifetime subscription to O’Reilly online learning which gives me free access to all the tech books I ever need. Two books were published in the last few months that I was curious to read: the third edition of “The Definitive Guide To DAX” by my friends Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari, and “Microsoft Power BI Visual Calculations” by my colleague Jeroen ter Heerdt, Madzy Stikkelorum and Marc Lelijveld. As I’ve said many times, I don’t write book reviews here (least of of reviews of books by friends or colleagues where I could never be unbiased), but I think there’s some value sharing my thoughts on these books.

“The Definitive Guide To DAX”, 3rd Edition

It’s generally accepted that the one book that anyone who is serious about Power BI should own is “The Definitive Guide To DAX”. If you don’t already own a copy you should buy one, but since most people who read my blog probably have one already the more interesting question to ask is what’s new in the third edition and whether it’s worth upgrading – especially since I’d seen Marco say that the book had been completely rewritten. I’ve heard the “completely rewritten” line before and I was sceptical but it turns out that it really is a very different book. It’s not completely rewritten because there is material there from previous editions but there are a lot of changes.

First of all, as you would expect, all the new additions to DAX since the second edition was published are covered including user defined functions, visual calculations, calendar-based time intelligence functionality and window functions. These are all really important features you will want to use in your semantic models and reports so this is the main reason you’d want to buy a copy of this edition.

Secondly, the main (and justfied) criticism of the previous editions was that they were, as we say in the UK, “heavy going”. They had absolutely all the information you would ever need but they were not the easiest books to read or understand. That has been addressed in the third edition: the tone is a little bit more friendly and difficult concepts are now explained visually as well as in text. As a result it’s easier to recommend the book for beginners.

Thirdly, some advanced topics (for example around performance tuning) have been dropped. For example I searched for the term “callback” in this new edition and found no mentions; that’s not true of the second edition. I have mixed feelings about this because it means the book isn’t as “definitive” as it used to be, but I can understand why it’s happened: with so much new content to add, keeping these advanced topics would have made an already long book too long. And let’s be honest, how often do you look at the details of a DAX query plan? If the aim is to teach DAX then cutting content means it’s easier for the reader to focus on the core concepts.

In summary, then, another great piece of work from Marco and Alberto and worth buying even if you have a copy of an earlier edition.

“Microsoft Power BI Visual Calculations”

A whole book about visual calculations? As I mentioned above, they’re covered in one chapter of “The Definitive Guide To DAX” but that book focuses on DAX; this one takes more time to explain the concepts and, crucially, includes a lot of practical examples of how to use them. Like user-defined functions, when visual calculations were released there was an explosion of community content showing how they can be used to solve problems that were difficult to solve in Power BI before – problems that no-one could have been anticipated that would be solved with visual calculations. The real value of this book is showing how to build a bump chart or a tornado chart with visual calculations and that makes it worth checking out.

Closing thoughts: why buy a book?

As you would expect, a lot of the information contained in these books is already available for free somewhere on the internet. And with AI you don’t even need to know how to search for it or stitch it all together – you can ask a question and get an answer customised to your exact scenario. So why buy books any more? I guess it depends on whether you only want to get your problems solved or understand how to solve problems yourself. For me (even though my attention span has eroded in recent years, just like everyone else’s) the only way to grasp really difficult concepts is through long-form written explanations or training courses, not fragments found in blog posts or 10-minute videos. I suspect that AI is the final nail in the coffin of the tech publishing industry but the tech book industry not being viable any more is not the same thing as tech books not being useful any more. Or maybe I’m just old-fashioned.

Two New Power BI/Power Query Books

It’s time for another one of my occasional posts about free books that I’ve been given that you might be interested to check out. The usual disclaimers apply: these aren’t impartial, detailed reviews and the links contain an Amazon UK affiliate code so I get a kickback if you buy a copy.

Power Query Beyond The User Interface, by Chandeep Chhabra

Chandeep is of course famous on YouTube from the Goodly Power BI channel; I’ve met him at conferences and he’s just as friendly and passionate in real life. That passion shows through in this book. It’s aimed at people who already know Power Query and want to learn M and while it does a great job of that, I think anyone who writes M on a regular basis would also benefit from reading it. It’s packed with practical examples, well-written, everything is clearly explained and it covers more recent additions to the language that older books might not talk about. It’s focused on the M language and doesn’t cover topics like performance tuning but I think that focus is a good thing. Highly recommended for anyone serious about Power Query.

Architecting Power BI Solutions In Microsoft Fabric, by Nagaraj Venkatesan

It looks like the Packt marketing machine has gone into overdrive for this title because I see both Greg Lowe and Sandeep Pawar have already published their reviews, and I agree with their sentiments. Power BI (and even more so Fabric) is complicated and so there’s a huge demand for guidance around what all of the components do and how to put them together to create a solution. The team I work on at Microsoft, the Fabric CAT team, has a published guidance documentation here and other people have written books, blog posts and white papers addressing the same problem. This book is certainly a very useful addition to the existing literature. It covers newer topics like Power BI Copilot and some topics that are rarely if ever mentioned elsewhere, such as Power BI’s integration with Purview. As the other reviewers have mentioned, books like this always suffer from changes to the product making them out of date very quickly but that’s unavoidable. Also, being written by a Microsoft employee (and this is something I can relate to), it’s not very opinionated and doesn’t tell you which features of the product are good and which ones should be avoided. All in all, pretty good though.

Power BI/AI Book Roundup

Here’s another one of my occasional posts about books I’ve been sent free copies of. Full disclosure: as always, these aren’t reviews as such, they’re more like free publicity in return for the free books and I don’t pretend to be unbiased; also the Amazon UK links have a affiliate code in that gives me a kickback if you buy any of these books.

The AI Value Playbook, Lisa Weaver-Lambert

What am I doing covering an AI book here? Lisa is an ex-colleague of mine at Microsoft and I respect her opinions. Also, I suspect like a lot of you, I have mixed feelings about the current AI boom: I can see the value in AI but I can also see the vast amount of hype and the obviously ridiculous claims being made. More than anything I see senior executives talking confidently about a subject I’m sure they don’t understand, and that is clearly a big problem. This book aims to help solve that problem by providing a practical guide to AI for non-technical leaders, in the form of a series of case studies and interviews with entrepreneurs and C-level people in the AI space. This is a very readable book – Lisa has talked to a lot of interesting, knowledgeable people – and the format makes it a lot more palatable for the target audience of your boss’s boss’s boss than your average tech book. As a technical person who isn’t by any means an AI expert I also enjoyed reading it.

The Complete Power BI Interview Guide, Sandielly Ortega Polanco, Gogula Aryalingam and Abu Bakar Nisa Alvi

Spend any time on public Power BI forums and you’ll see a lot of questions from people who want to know how to start a career in Power BI or get tips for Power BI interviews; as a result I’m sure there’s a big market for a book like this. It’s a mix of technical topics (the type that you might be asked about in a technical interview for a Power BI job) and non-technical advice such as how to network on LinkedIn, negotiate salaries and acecpt or reject a job offer. That might seem a bit of a strange combination but it works and the advice is both detailed and very sensible, so as a result I would have no hesitation in recommending this to anyone trying to get a job as a Power BI developer.

Power BI/Data Books Roundup

It’s time for another short post on the free books that various authors have been kind enough to send me over the last few months. Full disclosure: these aren’t reviews as such, they’re more like free publicity in return for the free books, and I don’t pretend to be unbiased; also the Amazon UK links have a affiliate code in that gives me a kickback if you buy any of these books.

Deciphering Data Architectures, James Serra

I’ll be honest, I’ve had this book hanging around in my inbox since February and I wasn’t sure what to expect of it, but when I finally got round to reading it I enjoyed it a lot and found it very useful. If you’re looking for clear, concise explanations of all of the jargon and methodologies that are in use in the data industry today then this is the book for you. Do you want to understand the difference between Kimball and Inmon? Get an honest overview of data mesh? Choose between a data lake and a relational data warehouse? It’s all here and more. It’s an opinionated book (which I appreciate) and quite funny in places too. Definitely a book for every junior BI consultant to read and for more senior people to have handy to fill in gaps in their knowledge.

Extending Power BI with Python and R (second edition), Luca Zavarella

I posted about the first edition of this book back in 2021; this new edition has several new chapters about optimising R and Python settings, using Intel’s Math Kernel library for performance and addressing integration challenges. As before this is all fascinating stuff that no-one else in the Power BI world is talking about. I feel like a future third edition covering what will be possible with Power BI and Python in Fabric in 2-3 years will be really cool.

Data Cleaning with Power BI, Gus Frazer

It’s always nice to see authors focusing on a business problem – in this case data cleaning – rather than a technology. If you’re looking for an introductory book on Power Query this certainly does the job but the real value here is the way it looks at how to clean data for Power BI using all of the functionality in Power BI, not just Power Query, as well as tools like Power Automate. It’s also good at telling you what you should be doing with these tools and why. Extra credit is awarded for including a chapter that covers Azure OpenAI and Copilot in Dataflows Gen2.

Yet Another Power BI (And Synapse) Book Roundup

I like free stuff and I like books, so of course I like free books – and it seems that the more I provide free publicity for relevant books here the more free books I get sent. I’ve now got enough to merit writing another post covering those I’ve received recently from various publishers and authors. As always these are not reviews, just short summaries of books you might want to check out.

Microsoft Power BI Data Analyst Certification Guide, by Orrin Edenfield and Edward Corcoran

Studying for a certification is a great way to learn a technology and this book is intended for those studying for the PL-300 Power BI Data Analyst exam. In terms of technical content this book is a good general introduction to Power BI development and administration, so nothing out of the ordinary, but knowing that the book is written to cover the exam syllabus and the generous number of practice questions would be the reason to buy it.

Power BI for the Excel Analyst, by Wyn Hopkins

Taking a different angle on learning Power BI is Wyn Hopkins, who has aimed his book at people coming from the Excel community (Wyn himself is a well-known Excel and Power BI MVP who has a great YouTube channel). I’m surprised there aren’t more people writing content like this since the vast majority of people using Power BI come from this background; Rob Collie cornered the market years ago but has been very quiet recently. Once again it’s an introductory guide to Power BI development but there’s a healthy amount of real-world experience inside as well as opinion, which I like – it not only makes the book more valuable but also more readable.

Pro Power BI Dashboard Creation, by Adam Aspin

Adam Aspin is a prolific author of Power BI books and this one focuses on the mechanics of building reports and dashboards. It’s not one of those preachy “data visualisation” books but a guide to the Power BI report canvas, all the visuals and their properties and settings: there’s a whole chapter on drilling up and down, for example. As a result even an experienced Power BI report designer will probably find something in it that they didn’t know.

Azure Synapse Analytics Cookbook, by Gaurav Agarwal and Meenakshi Muralidharan

Not strictly a Power BI book, I know, but a general introduction to Synapse in the worked example/cookbook format – although there is a chapter on how to use Power BI with Synapse. Gaurav is a colleague of mine on the Power BI CAT team at Microsoft so of course I want to call out this new book that he has co-written! My Synapse knowledge is not as good as it should be so I learned a few things reading it.

New Book: “Microsoft Power BI Performance Best Practices” By Bhavik Merchant

I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again: I don’t publish book reviews here on my blog but I’m always happy to promote new Power BI books when they are published in return for a free copy.

Recently a friend and ex-Microsoft colleague of mine, Bhavik Merchant, published a book called “Microsoft Power BI Performance Best Practices” which I wrote the foreword for and I think (although of course I’m biased) it’s a good one. It’s about tuning all aspects of Power BI report and refresh performance, including DAX, data modelling, gateway configuration, Power Query/M and report design; it also covers the use of external tools like DAX Studio and Tabular Editor. From a purely technical point of view it gathers together a lot of useful information that is otherwise scattered across various documentation articles, blog posts, conference presentations and white papers; what I particularly liked, though, is the emphasis on methodology and how you should think about approaching performance tuning. If you’re new to Power BI this is a great resource but even experienced Power BI developers and consultants will learn something from it.

You can buy the book from Amazon UK here.

New Book: “Extending Power BI With Python And R”

Back in September I posted about a few new Power BI-related books I was given to review for free; that post led to me getting sent another freebie book, “Extending Power BI with Python and R”, by Luca Zavarella (buy it from Amazon UK here). I found this book particularly interesting because I know very little about Python or R, but I also know that this is a really hot topic for many people and I was curious to know what problems using these languages in Power BI might solve.

I can’t comment on the quality of the Python and R advice (although I’m pretty sure Luca knows what he’s writing about), but from the point of view of a Power BI developer the book does a good job of explaining how using them allows you to do things that are difficult or impossible otherwise. There are chapters on regular expressions, calling APIs, using machine learning models and advanced visualisations. I haven’t seen any other books, videos or blog posts that cover these topics in such detail, so if you have some Python or R skills and want to make use of them in Power BI this book seems to be a good bet.

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.

The Second Edition Of “The Definitive Guide To DAX” Is Out!

If you’re a Power BI fan there are three possible answers to the question “Did you know that the second edition of The Definitive Guide To DAX has just been published?”:

Answer#1: Yup, I’ve already got my copy!

If this is your answer there’s no need to read any further.

Answer #2: What’s “The Definitive Guide To DAX”?

If, on the other hand, you’re new to Power BI and this is what you’re thinking then I should explain that “The Definitive Guide To DAX” is a book by Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari and is what its title suggests it is – the sum total of human knowledge about the DAX calculation and query language used by Power BI, written by the two people who know most about it outside the development team. Marco and Alberto are friends of mine but I don’t think anyone can accuse me of bias when I say that it’s a book that every Power BI developer needs to own, so go out and buy it! If you use Power BI you need to learn DAX and while this book may not be a simple step-by-step tutorial it has in it somewhere answers to just about every question you’ll ever ask about DAX – and, more importantly, the answers it has are as correct and as up-to-date as they possibly can be. I can tell you that it’s proved invaluable to me in my work at least twice in the last week alone.

Answer #3: Yes, I saw that but I already have the first edition – is it worth buying this one too?

This is a slightly more difficult question to answer, but I’m still going to recommend that you buy the second edition. As Marco says in his announcement blog post, a lot of the existing content has been updated and rewritten and a lot of new content has been added. If you care about following all the latest DAX best practices and you don’t want the new hire in your department to mock you because you’ve never heard of DAX Studio, you need to buy this new edition.

[Note: I didn’t get a free copy of this book for review (yet?) but I have an O’Reilly Online Learning account which means I could read it as soon as it was published]

PS I know someone needs to write the “Definitive Guide to M” but it’s not going to be me, at least not right now.

Book Review: “Collect, Combine And Transform Data Using Power Query In Excel And Power BI” by Gil Raviv

I generally try to avoid writing book reviews here, but the fact that there are so few books available on Power Query and M means that I’m making an exception for “Collect, Combine and Transform Data using Power Query in Excel and Power BI” by Gil Raviv.

The first thing to say about this book is that it takes the approach of teaching through exercises and worked examples, rather than by explaining abstract concepts. If this suits your style of learning (and I know that it does for a lot of people) then you’re in luck; if you’re looking for a book that will explain what all the different join types for Merge operations do, for example, then you’ll be disappointed. This isn’t a criticism though – I don’t think it’s possible to write a book that will satisfy everyone – and Gil has done a good job of covering a lot of common data preparation scenarios. One important exception to this is the chapter on M which provides a very clear introduction to the language and the way it works. I suspect a lot of people will want to buy the book for this chapter alone.

The second thing to say about this book is that while it covers both Power Query in Excel and Power BI, in my opinion it’s aimed slightly more at Excel users. Again, this is not a criticism: although advanced Excel users and Power BI report designers have to solve many of the same problems, they also have some very different concerns too. What’s more, if you can assume your readers have good Excel skills and can explain Power Query concepts in Excel terms then you’ll serve that particular set of readers well, and probably do a better job for them than if you assume they are completely new to the area of data transformation and preparation have no existing skills in this area.

All in all it’s a good book that I can recommend to anyone who wants to learn Power Query and M, and also for intermediate users who want to deepen their knowledge. I still think there’s a need for a book completely devoted to M and covering topics such as custom connectors and dataflows; hopefully someone writes one soon!

Full disclosure: I received a free copy of the book from the author. I’m also the author of a Power Query book myself, but to be honest it’s several years old now and a bit out-of-date, so it’s hard to recommend it any more.

You can buy a copy of this book from Amazon UK here.