Book Review: Expert Data Modeling with Power BI

Somewhere last year I started reading this book on Power BI. It actually took me quite a while to finish it, because of [reasons]. 😀
But now that I finally finished it, I thought it would be good to write a short review on my thougths about the book, so you know if it is worth your time and money.

The book is from fellow-MVP Soheil Bakhshi (@biinsightnz | B) called Expert Data Modeling with Power BI. 

TL;DR

Yes, it is definitely worth it! 😁

The long version

I think the combination of good, practical examples and in-depth coverage of (Power BI) features is the best about this book. You can also follow along with the step-by-step examples, as I think going hands-on is the best way of learning things. With reading you can only pick up so much knowledge, while putting it in practice right away enriches the learning experience much more.

Next to that, the book is also filled with best practices for data preparation as well as data modeling.

Soheil is not afraid of touching upon and explaining more advanced and complex topics, like:

• Incremental refresh
• Calculation groups
• Aggregations
• The new composite models
• Slowly changing dimensions

One point of critique if you will: sometimes I felt that adding color to an image in the book, could get the message across better. But I also get that this makes the pages more crowded, and probably also more expensive, and is not the way Packt publishes their books 😀

All in all I very much enjoyed reading this book! And I definitely learned a lot.
I think I knew, or at least have heard of, all the features that were explained in the book. But if you've never used/implemented RLS you don't really know what you're up against. The same goes for aggregations or calculation groups for example. So reading up on those features with good examples has definitely enriched my knowledge.

I've already started reading my next book, so stay tuned for another review!