I recently finished the book Calling Bullshit – The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World by Carl T. Bergstrom & Jevin D. West. I found it a very entertaining read, and especially useful in this day and age of social media, fake news and deep fakes. Calling out bullshit has been necessary for a […]
Tag: book review
Book Review: T-SQL Window Functions by Itzik Ben-Gan
A couple of years back Itzik Ben-Gan (the T-SQL guru) wrote the book Microsoft SQL Server 2012 High-Performance T-SQL Using Window Functions. It’s has been one of my most favorite technical books (I included it in this list): it was really an eye-opener to how useful and powerful window functions can be. It teaches the […]
Book Review – Factfulness by Hans Rosling
I recently bought the book Factfulness – Ten Reasons we’re wrong about the world – And why things are better than you think by Hans Rosland (with Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund). The book is a fascinating read and I recommend it to everyone. Not just people working with data. Not just journalists. Not […]
Book Review – Analyzing Data with Microsoft Power BI and Power Pivot for Excel
As preparation for my session at Techorama.be about data modeling in self-service BI, I decided to read the book Analyzing Data with Microsoft Power BI and Power Pivot for Excel by Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari. The title is quite a mouthful but it gets the point across: the book mostly deals with how to correctly build […]
Book Review – The Biml Book
After years of waiting, a book about Biml has been published! It’s conveniently titled “The Biml Book” (subtitled Business Intelligence and Data Warehouse Automation) and I can tell you immediately it’s the best Biml book I’ve ever read! (haha, it will take a while until this joke gets old). In all seriousness though, it’s a great […]
Book Review – The Truthful Art
I’m participating in the #vizBookClub, a great idea by the data visualization community. In short, we read a book about data visualization and we post our thoughts online. A blog post with more detail: Introducing our Data Viz Book Club. The first selected book is The Truthful Art by Alberto Cairo (blog | twitter). I’ve always […]
Book Review – Power Pivot and Power BI
Since Power BI is all the rage right now, I was in need of some material to spice up my knowledge of DAX (read: finally understand how CALCULATE works). I’ve been following the website powerpivotpro.com for quite some time now and they always have very insightful articles about DAX and real world scenarios. Anyway, Rob Collie […]
Book Review – Expert Performance Indexing
A few weeks back, the folks at Apress Publishing sent me a copy of the book Expert Performance Indexing in SQL Server for me to review. Since I know both the authors and since I’m familiar with the spectacular work they do, I was happy to do so. Doesn’t mean I won’t do an honest […]
Book review – Extending SSIS with .NET Scripting
Recently I got my hands on a copy of Extending SSIS with .NET Scripting, written by SQL Server MVP Joost van Rossum (blog | twitter). My .NET scripting knowledge could use an update, so I decided to read the whole book and provide you with a full review. About the author I’ve known Joost van Rossum for […]
Reblog: Data Visualization – Book Review
To prepare myself for my session Data Visualization Tips & Tricks, I read a few books. In this blog post, I’ll give a short review for each one of them. Information Dashboard Design This book, written by Stephen Few, was the first one I read. And it was a fascinating read! I went through the […]