A while back I got something to read – a book about BIRT (written by John Ward and published by Packt Publishing).
John Graham already posted his review about the book here and here. He summarized the content very well so I don’t need to go into the detail about the chapters anymore. Thanks John! 🙂
The book is well structured and easy to follow. It starts with information about Eclipse and BIRT and explains what and how to download, install, etc. The style is clearly a tutorial style.
The examples used in this book are a mixture of small self-created examples and BIRT’s Classic Cars example. You will learn what pieces form a report, how to create reports and how to put the pieces together to get reports from a SQL database and also from XML or flat (CSV) files.
Although there is some comparison of BIRT to other reporting engines this book is better for you if you just want to learn and understand BIRT. It contains a chapter of how to deploy BIRT but the book is not of that much help if you are a developer that is looking at integrating BIRT into your own applications. The deployment just handles the BIRT Viewer that comes with BIRT.
The bottom line is: I can recommend this book if you want to learn, understand and use BIRT for creating reports. I also recommended it to my colleagues that wanted to learn BIRT.