Microsoft Power BI Cookbook: Gain expertise in Power BI with over 90 hands-on recipes, tips, and use cases

This is a book I wish I’d had when first starting out with Power BI. The title perhaps hides the true potential of this book. In addition to offering a range of end-to-end solutions, it also gives some advanced design and development tips to help you get the most of your Power BI reports.The book kicks things off by going through the process of installing and configuring the tools you’ll need to make the most of Power BI. This not only includes the Power BI Desktop application, but also some of the community developed tools such as Tabular editor and DAX Studio. It then goes on to look at how you can access and retrieve data, build a solid data model, and build Power BI reports, before moving on to the step-by-step recipes.This is the second edition of this book and adds new examples covering query optimization, aggregation tables, Power BI API, and paginated reports. The book runs to over 600 pages and is an essential reference for anyone who is in the business of building Power BI reports.If I had any criticism of this book, it’s that the layout of some of the example code can be difficult to read as it wraps to fit on the page. However, the examples are available online.Overall, I give this book 5 stars and highly recommend it to any Power BI developers.

This book starts off with going through the process of installing and configuring the tools you need to get the most out of PowerBI something that you only find after digging deep on forums or blogs. Great to see Tabular Editor and DAX Studio. Then moves onto the getting your data, modelling and then building the key bit for many will be the getting the model and your data into shape. The loads of step by step recipes that help build more and more understanding, the depths still to explore in Power BI is something this book has sparked in me that none of the other books has so far.

Power BI has evolved and expanded. I bought this book from packt mainly to understand the advanced features of PBI especially from the standpoint of how it integrates with other tools. In this sense, the book covers topics like advanced analytics. I like the cookbook format also.