Saturday, August 22, 2009

"Pentaho Solutions": copies hit the mail

Hi!

Just a few hours ago, I arrived home after a very quiet and peaceful two-week holiday with my family. It was great! I didn't bring a computer on purpose. I brought a mobile phone, but didn't answer that on purpose too :) Result: absolute relaxation, with lots of time to hike, cycle, and read, and occasional visits to musea and historic sites. Bliss :)

Anyway, now that the bags are unpacked, and the kids are asleep, it's time to face the dragon better known as my inbox. What I found brought a big smile to my face:

Pentaho corp. posing with a copy of "Pentaho Solutions"

Yes - it's true!! Copies of my and Jos' book Pentaho Solutions: Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing with Pentaho and MySQL have hit the mail, and at least one copy has reached the Pentaho office.

Pentaho-ers, thanks for your kind email, and thanks for a great product!

I haven't received one myself (yet), and it will probably take some time still to ship the books to Europe. But it's certainly good to see a physical proof of our work.

Anyway - if you are expecting a copy of the book because you pre-ordered one, or if I or Jos promised you a copy, fear not, it should be heading your way. I hope you like it - Enjoy :)

18 comments:

Anonymous said...

Congratulations!
I think more books on open source BI solutions are needed, and you're well positioned to be offering one now.

Shlomi Noach said...

Roland,

Congratulations! It's great to see the fruit of a long, hard work!

Shlomi

Anonymous said...

Roland - congrats. There is a huge demand for a book like this and I'm sure it'll be a big success.

R Daley

rpbouman said...

Hi mr. Daley, Shlomi and mdahlman!

thank you all very much for your encouraging words!

Jos and I hope the book will be useful to everybody that wants to get started with Pentaho. We tried to strike the right balance between general BI/Datawarehousing theory and realizing practical solutions using Pentaho. The intention is to allow people that are familiar with database technology but not datawarehousing to get the proper grounding and achieve almost immediate results. At the same time, we think the book will be a real time saver for experienced BI professionals that are not yet familiar with how to get things done with Pentaho.

I sincerely hope our readers will give us and Wiley feedback to let us know if we succeeded and if we can improve our work. Personally, I think we touch upon plenty topics that could fill an in-depth book in themselves. But, since this is pretty much the first Pentaho book in print, we'll just have to see if there is demand for that.

thanks again for posting! I appreciate it a lot.

Kind regards,

Roland.

crorella said...

Hi Roland, congratulations!

This was THE book we were waiting for.

In fact, I've already pre-ordered 2 copies :D.

Regards,
Cristian

rpbouman said...

Thanks for the support, Christian!

I hope the book will be useful for you.

Kind regards,

Roland

Robin Schumacher said...

Roland -

Just saw this: congrats! I'm sure the material is excellent. I hope you've got more in the works.

Rick Heijster said...

Hi Roland,

I live in the Netherlands and I received this book last Saturday. I only had time to quickly look through it, but I was impressed.

Thanks for your (and Jos') hard labor! This book was euros well spent!

Gr.
Rick

rpbouman said...

Hi Rick!

dankjewel ;)

Thanks for your kind words, I really appreciate it. Perhaps when you read it and are still happy, (and can if you can find the time :), you can write a review on Amazon? Let me know if you do, and I'll buy you a beer :) Of course, if you aren't happy, let me know too - beers would still be on me in that case :)

kind regards,

Roland

Unknown said...

Hi Roland,

I live in Brazil and got your book just today. As soon as I had the chance, I started browsing through it.

So for, there's one little problem that I'd like to point out:

On page 9, where you mention the Steel Wheels and BI Developer Examples, it only states that both solutions should show up on the browser, but that's not the case. By default, the only solution loaded by the BI Server is the Steel Wheels one.

I'll keep reading on, but just thought I should point that out.

Anyways, 'tis just one minor issue. I still believe that the book was a great idea and I'm really looking forward to reading the whole thing.

Congratulations!

Renato Back

rpbouman said...

Hi Renato!

what version are you using? Both example solutions do show up in the versions we used to write the book (3.0 and 3.5 development builds)

Unknown said...

Hi Rolland,

Thanks for the quick response, I've been using 2.0.

After reading your post, I installed 3.0 and there were the examples. My bad.

Once again, thanks for your quick response!

Cheers,

Renato Back

rpbouman said...

Hi Renato,

glad that solved your problem. If you do find some problem or mistake in the book after all, feel free to post back anytime, and I'll try to address any issues you might have.

If you like the book, Jos and I would be most obliged if you could blog about it or post a review on Amazon or whatever. Of course, only in case you can find the time.

Kind regards and good luck,

ROland.

Steve Dalton said...

Hi Roland

I'm just starting some work with Pentaho DI and your book looks pretty awesome - just what I need. Only problem for me is that I really try hard to not buy paper books for various reasons (high cost of shipping to Australia [our bookstores here are notoriously slow at getting new book], searchability & trees!) and was wondering if you know if Wiley are planning a PDF version that we can buy???

Many thanks
Steve

rpbouman said...

Hi Steve!

thanks for the interest! Part III of "Pentaho Solutions" is all about DI/ETL. It contains three chapters covering concepts and introduction, ETL/DI design, and deployment: more than 122 pages alltogether.

But of course, ETL/DI is a very broad subject, Pentaho Data Integration has a lot of functionality, so we're still just scratching the surface of the tip of the iceberg. I do think it's a pretty good start though.

Concerning the e-book: good question, I'm glad you asked. The answer is yes, and it is already available! You can get it here: http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0470572728.html

Thanks again, and kind regards,

Roland

Anonymous said...

Hi Roland,

I want to ask if the book is about Enterprise version of Pentaho or about Community version.
Thank you!

Nelu

Unknown said...

Hi Roland,

I want to ask you if the book is about Enterprise version of Pentaho or about Community version.
Thank you!

Nelu

rpbouman said...

Hi Nelu,

the book covers the community edition pf Pentaho 3.5. We do have a few paragraphs here and there to inform the reader about additional functionality present in the enterprise edition. But we developed and executed all code samples and how-to's on the early builds of the 3.5 release of the community edition.

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