My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This book is a very worthwhile read and reference but it does have a limited audience. That audience is restricted to those with access to the high end version of SharePoint Server 2010. Basically SharePoint Server 2010 will all the options enabled. It is however a very worthwhile reference for the simple reason that there are few books that dive into that level of detail on these high end features of SharePoint Enterprise.
Initially I was going to say that this book focused more on talking about the capabilities of BI (business intelligence) in SharePoint Server but as I got more into the book I found there were more and more hands on examples which made it really great. The only problems with these examples is that they require a high level of product and setup to really take advantage of but they certainly do give insight into what BI is possible with SharePoint especially when combined with SQL server.
This book is therefore great for people looking to understand the high end features of SharePoint Server 2010 (and to some extend Office 365) but it does require an investment in products such as Visio, SQL Reporting and so on that in many cases are not readily obtained or implemented. This is certainly not a book for end users and is more aimed at the IT Professional looking to bring the integration required for BI into the workplace. However, for the IT professional looking to scale up their SharePoint skills to the higher level of product and potentially to the abilities provided by Office 365 this is more than a worthwhile reference for the library.
CIAOPS 