Definitive Guide to DAX, The: Business intelligence with Microsoft Excel, SQL Server Analysis Services, and Power BI (Business Skills)

I'm no newcomer when it comes to technical computing books; I've read many over the years. When I read this book the first time, I found the content extremely difficult to follow. I came close to giving up many times, and found myself skimming over a lot of it because I didn't understand what was being discussed. I picked the book up again a few months later, and read it for a second time. Suddenly things just seemed to click and make sense. I realised it wasn't that the book was badly written or badly organised; it was just that I needed time to digest the concepts and ideas, which require a very different way of thinking to other computing languages. I am now reading the book for a third time, and I ampicking up nuggets of useful information with almost every page I turn. I can now say this certainly is the definitive guide to DAX; just give it some time and patience, and you'll also agree.

Very comprehensive reference to DAX. Its cover on time intelligence is very practical and comprehensive. However, I wouldn't recommend this book to DAX beginners, for whom DAXercises by Matt Allington is a better option.

Ok book helped explain some concepts but not an easy read or good unless you really know the subject. Reads a bit like stereo instructions & I working in the IT industry

A difficult but highly recommended book. There may be no substitute for it! I scribble my notes all over this book.

This book is amazing. It gives you full approach to building calculations in DAX and data model optimization. It covers all needed dax expressions in several examples. Full recommendation!

This book has taught me a huge amount about DAX in a fortnight, but I need to read some chapters again intensively to pick it up fully. The book does warn of this. DAX is probably more like SQL than a OO language, and yet knowing SQL won't get you into the syntax, only the mindset.The stuff towards the back of the book on how DAX models are stored internally, and column based databases, is extremely valuable. Now I realise that I can round some of my numeric data to 3dp to get much faster results. This is totally non-obvious without this background information.

This is a book that will be useful for many years and will probably take some a few years to fully get their (and my) head around it. The explanations are comprehensive but I think some of the concepts could have been explained a little better. I realise that it is complex but a few diagrams here and there might have helped. Having said that, I think it is a good book which will serve me well long term. Based on this I ordered Analyzing Data with Power BI and Power Pivot and hope the quality is as high as on this one.

The well renowed experts delivers on their promise. I enjoyed reading the content which is well written and in the fewcases where extra examples are needed there is a large blog community on the matter by both the authors and other experts on DAX.