Thursday, May 21, 2009

Completed Draft for the "Pentaho Solutions" Book

Yes!

Last night, I completed the draft of "Pentaho Solutions", which is a book I'm writing together with my friend and colleague Jos van Dongen for Wiley.

(Actually, the full title is: "Pentaho Solutions: Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing with Pentaho and MySQL")

Here's an overview of the contents, just to give you an idea what we have been doing:

  • Part I: Getting Started, Prerequisites, Installation and Configuration and Overview

    • Chapter 1: Quick Start: Pentaho PCI Examples

    • Chapter 2: Prerequisites

    • Chapter 3: Server Installation and Configuration

    • Chapter 4: The Pentaho BI Stack


  • Part II: Business Case, Dimensional Modeling, Data Warehouse and Data Mart Design

    • Chapter 5: Example Business Case: World Class Movies

    • Chapter 6: Data warehouse primer

    • Chapter 7: Modeling the Business: Logical Design using Star Schemas

    • Chapter 8: The Data Mart Design Process


  • Part III: ETL and Data Integration

    • Chapter 9: Pentaho Data Integration

    • Chapter 10: Designing Pentaho Data Integration Solutions

    • Chapter 11: Deploying Pentaho Data Integration Solutions


  • Part IV: Business Intelligence Applications

    • Chapter 12: The Metadata Layer

    • Chapter 13: Reporting using Jfree

    • Chapter 14: Scheduling, Subscription and Bursting

    • Chapter 15: OLAP Solutions using Pentaho Analysis Services

    • Chapter 16: Data Mining with Weka

    • Chapter 17: Building Dashboards


So - Jos and I will be processing comments from the copy and tech editors for the remainder of this month, and then, if all goes well this is going to result in a book with about 550 pages which should be available in the first week of September (2009). You can actually pre-order a copy already on Amazon and benefit from the special 37%(!) pre-order discount:

I admit that it has been way more work than I thought, and I'm very glad we have reached this milestone. That said, I really am quite happy with what we've written so far, and I am convinced we will be delivering a valuable book for everybody that is interested in getting started with Business Intelligence, or just Pentaho, or both. Although Jos and I did the writing, we got great support from Pentaho developers as well as various community members, and this really was a huge help to us. (I don't want to name names now because I would risk leaving someone out accidentally - We'll make sure to get a full list of acknowledgements)

As a project I think things have developed pretty good too. We experienced some delay with respect to our original schedule, but to be frank I expected that would happen when we started this. All in all, we are two weeks behind, but on a +6 months period of time, I don't think that's too bad. I really should mention that so far, we received excellent coaching and advice from our contacts at Wiley, Bob Elliot and Sara Shlaer. Thanks! and on to the last few bits of work...

Update: I forgot to mention - we are covering the new and upcoming version of the Pentaho platform, Pentaho 3. However, tools within the platform follow their own version scheme so a single version number doesn't say that much (for example, the data integration chapters focus on Pentaho Data Integration 3.2)

26 comments:

Dave Stokes said...

Congratulations on getting the draft done!

Todd Farmer said...

Congratulations! I'm eagerly awaiting this book - it fills a very important gap. I'm pre-ordering now. ;)

Andrew Dashin said...

Congratulations, Roland!

DM said...

Congrats! I will buy this book when available.
Please, go deep in cap 14-17: the most usefull things to learn and apply in real life solutions!

--
Daniele

Dan said...

Let me know if you need any help proof reading - im sure you have plenty of others assisting too!

Josep Curto said...

Congratulations, Roland!

I will review the book for BeyeNETWORK Spain as soon it will be available.

Kind regards.

Josep Curto
http://beyenetwork.es/channels/1532

DBA_Alex said...

Looking forward to getting my copy. Just curious, which version of Pentaho was used for the book?

Gretchen Moran said...

Can't wait to get it Roland, and congratulations!

-Gretchen

Jonathan Levin said...

Heck, I'd buy it ;)

Jonathan Levin said...

Heck, I'd buy it ;)

Logical Judgement said...

Way to go! Congrats!

hingo said...

"I admit that it has been way more work than I thought, and I'm very glad we have reached this milestone"Heh, I should warn you that "just finished the first draft" isn't usually as near the end as you'd think :-) Ok, so if it really will be out in the stores in September, then you are relatively safe.

Even so, congratulations for a good effort! You will be happy about having written this book when you are an old man.

rpbouman said...

Hi All!

thank you all so much for your congratulations and kind words! I really appreciate it, and I am so delighted some of you pre-ordered the book.

I updated the post to answer DBA_Alex's question: the book is mostly about Pentaho 3, the upcoming version. We've also included some info on the next version, the Citrus release.

Even though the focus is on pentaho 3, much of the information applies to pentaho 2.0 or even 1.7, esp. regarding PDI and mondrian.

Anyway, thanks! For now, it's back to work for me, I still have chapters to correct.

Cheers, and thanks again,

Roland

Unknown said...

Roland,

Congratulations on completing the draft. Can't wait to get a copy.

Many thanks

James

Unknown said...

Congratulations Roland - looking forward to your book.

James

andtorg said...

Congratulations,
this is bound to be the right book for me at the right moment. I look forward to buying it.

//andrea

Anonymous said...

Great work Roland! I'm looking forward to buy it!

Hans

Unknown said...

Congratulations!
Looking forward to buying it.

Also, I would like to translate your book into Japanese if it is possible.
Currently, we are localizing Pentaho products.
I would like to introduce useful books to Japan.

Yoshi

rpbouman said...

Hi yoshiteru!

thank you! I hope you'll like it ;)

Awesome that you're interested in doing a translation!! I would really love that.

The best way to go about translating the book is to contact our publisher, Wiley, and write them to ask them what the best way forward is. See, publishing a translation usually requires a local publisher to be interested in publishing it, and then this local publisher finds a translator. It's likely that Wiley already has contacts with Japanese publishers, and I am sure they'd be thrilled to tell you.

I hope this helps! Just shoot me a private email if you get stuck, and i will try to help from my end.

kind regards,

Roland

Mr.Urs said...

Congratulations Roland
Waiting to see your book in the store!

Best Wishes
-Satya

Anonymous said...

Congratulations Roland

Hi

when it will be available in India.

rpbouman said...

Hi Anonymous!

the way things are looking now, the book will be available in the first half of August! I am not aware of any separate distribution schemes for India, and I expect the book to be availalbe there too by that time.

Whether Indian bookshops will get a stock of them, I don't know. But if you want a copy, I'm sure that at least in the urban areas, ordering via Amazon will be reasonably reliable. If you want a copy anyway, I would suggest going that route esp. while you can still enjoy the Amazon pre-ordering discount

kind regards,

Roland

Rick Heijster said...

Hi Ronald,

I just ordered it. When I started using Pentaho in January, there weren't any books available. Happy to see that that is about to change.

Greetings from a fellow Dutchman.

Rick

Anonymous said...

Congratulation For this job...
Dont forget to make this available in Africa to.

rpbouman said...

Hi Rick!

dankjewel! Ik hoop dat je wat aan het boek hebt. Je kunt altijd mailen als je er nog iets over wilt weten.

mvg,

Roland

rpbouman said...

Hi Anonymous!

thank you very much for your interest. I am not personally involved in the distribution process, so I don't know if it will be available in the book stores in Africa (although I imagine it will be, at least in urban areas).

Anyway - I don't know if it helps, but you could try to order a copy through Amazon.

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