Very good book, lots of useful info that goes beyond the normal documentation.

The project: create a secure, distributed, Internet-facing, interactive ASP.Net reporting application for a Very Large Customer. The schedule: short. The budget: low. Amazingly, we got it done, and I credit Teo and this book with helping us meet our requirements.

The Microsoft Reporting Services 1.0 documentation is not very useful to the newcomer, and with 7 months' experience now, I can also say it's not very useful to the rising journeyman. The product is quirky, with surprising gaps and baroque security features. Without expert guidance from someone who has worked with the RS dev team I don't see how anybody would get much done with Reporting Services 1.0.

Teo Lachev worked intensively with the Microsoft dev team and the book shows it. Perhaps one of the reasons other reviews here gripe about the examples is that the most useful examples are the non-trivial ones in the second half of the book. Report authoring is the easy part! Delivering your reports to your users in the ways they demand is the hard part, and in my opinion this is where Teo's book shines.

It is no exaggeration to state that without Teo's book, and in particular his discussion of custom security extensions for Reporting Services, we would have failed to deliver the goods. But we succeeded... thanks Teo.

I found this book to have lots of information, but if you learn best by hands on examples, this is not the book for you. The author shows you a report already done and gives a quick explanation of how he got there. It is not a step-by-step type of book. As a lot of the examples shown do not have a how-to to go with it, I found this book not a good place to start. There are others that are more hands-on and step-by-step which are easier to learn from.

Having said that, if you've had some Reporting Services experience and are just looking to brush up on techniques and/or learn additional techniques, then this book will probably save you the tediousness of having to go through a step-by-step example that you have already done in the past.

Being a Microsoft trainer, and needing to get up to speed in a hurry, I found this book - luckily. This book was able to give me the answers to the "how do I do..." questions I had, and then enabled me to explain these concepts to my students.

Teo's style is easy to read, and he makes it easy to see how you can apply his examples to your reporting needs.

If you need to get up to speed on Reporting Services in a hurry, and need a book you can refer to in the future, this is the one.

The content reveals a lot of details of RS. However, I had a hard time to make the samples running.

This is one book every developer should have working with Reporting services , Covers every aspect of the subject in a precise and clear manner , The code examples are extremely helpful and I learnt so much about the subject with the code examples , The concepts are explained in a manner by which anyone , whether a novice or an experienced developer will find it very useful , I would highly recommend this book for anyone developing with Reporting Services

Microsoft RS provide a platform for customers to deliver report bundle with SQL Server 2000 license. The entry of RS to business intelligent reporting plus the standardization and cooperation with other reporting vendors like Cognos, the reporting market and direction are bright, and this book is definitely a good opening in the reporting services story. However, this book has a serious problem - cross reference. The author and editorial teams used a lot of cross reference, such as "we cover XX in chapter YY", "We'll see an example of this in XX", "We'll postpone discussing XX until...". These kind of sentences appeared many times in few chapters, and this might confuse the readers, or in reality this is a fault of the design and structure of this book itself. At any rate, this book is very rich in content and definitely a good read for all reporting developers and administrators.

(...)

Bought this book recently. The 5 stars given by all reviewers speaks enough about this book. I think it is THE best book on RS. At first I thought the praise for it was overblown, but now I stand corrected.

I purchased this book in mid-September, and my team and I refer to it constantly (now early November). The accompanying .Net project files and numerous sample reports are invaluable.

Teo's writing is easy to understand, and very thorough. We've purchased several Reporting Services books, and we use this one far and away more than all the others combined.

What's more Teo is pretty darn helpful in real-time too. I've emailed him on an issue and received an answer the same day.

I have had the priviledge of working with Teo on client projects and am very impressed with his ability to articulate technical information succintly using practical examples and applications of its features. This book gives you the hidden auspices of MS Reporting Services that you will not find in the Product documentation. I have used the information to leverage my ability to turn around successful compeletion of key tasks very quickly. Great addition to anyone's library of useful technical resources. Thanks Teo for writing it!

For many years Microsoft Access has had an excellent report generating system. Unfortunately this was tied to the rather week Jet database engine or lately to the somewhat stripped down MSDE. The industrial grade database was SQL Server. One solution was to use an Access front end to the SQL Server database engine. While this enabled the user to write reports easily, the overall system was somewhat of a kluge. Other alternatives were, of course to take the data out of the database and then write a reporting program in some other language. All in all, getting a suitable report was somewhat of a chore.

This is really a 'how-to' book on the use of SQL Server's new Reporting Services. It is written from a standpoint of not just repeating the product documentation that comes from Microsoft, but from the view of the developer who has to implement a solution.

It used to be that a report was basically a printed document. But now, this view has changed, and Reporting Services incorporates not only printed reports, but also reports that are to be web distributed, or as the information content for an OLAP application, enterprise level reports, or subscribed reports thatt are to be distributed automatically. This should be the only reporting services book you'll need - until of course the new versions of RS become available.