Xcelsius 2008 Dashboard Best Practices,   ISBN:9780672329951

Customer Rating: 

I've used Xcelsius "lightly" for several years, particularly to build interactive "ValueDialog models" for our business. Several new projects created a need to enhance and extend the use of Xcelsius for interactive, real time analysis. This book lives up to the title claim of Best Practices in many ways. It certainly goes well beyond the User Guide in explaining HOW to apply the components and capabilities. I have not yet tried the download examples, but I anticipate they will take my overall rating to 5.

Customer Rating: 

I have looked long and hard for a book like this, great explaination of the topic and downloadable examples.

Its a must have is you are developing dashboards with Xcelsius. If you haven't tried this product you should, you will be a hero with your C Suite!!

Customer Rating: 

Abdulezer's book is an excellent tutorial on Xcelsius 2008. I've now worked through the first 8 chapters and have learned much about how to use the application effectively. Be sure to download the useful example files .

Customer Rating: 

Just a quick note to anyone who is considering getting the Kindle version of this book. I got a Kindle 2.0 in early march and purchased the Kindle edition of this book yesterday. Rather than lug around a big 400 page book everywhere with me, the Kindle edition seemed to offer a great convenience. However, I chose to return this purchase after some time trying to read it. I plan on getting the regular print edition, because its an otherwise very up-to-date, detailed book with content that really helps anyone who is not a programmer to build nice looking Dashboards.

I did as much due diligence prior to the purchase as I could - I previewed the book online. If you think that the online preview matches up to what you will see in the Kindle edition, you will be sorely disappointed like I was. Online, the charts and dashboard examples were very readable although my laptop resolution was not set high . However, in the Kindle edition of this book, the illustrations were all washed out and several shades lighter than the actual text. It is nearly impossible to read the text in the images, thus making the book unusable. Considering that there's no contrast or zoom functionality for images on the kindle, there was no other option but to return the book.

Its not as though the Kindle is not capable of displaying illustrations, its resolution and rendering capabilities are pretty good. When you put the Kindle to "sleep" or it goes to standby, the screen displays a several beautifully detailed grayscale images in random order. Perhaps if Amazon had taken greater care when scanning the images and upped the contrast to make the images more readable and clearer, it would have helped.

Customer Rating: 

This book is rated A+ by the Xcelsius Guru Network! Business Objects should consider sending it with each Xcelsius license they sell. With such a limited amount of material available surrounding Xcelsius and the 'Best Practices' required to efficiently use the tool, Loren does a great job to serve every level of developer:

1) Beginners - Finally get to understand how to use the cool correctly from the start!
2) Advanced users - Now have the ability to gain step by step instruction on how to clean up their existing models to enhance performance and leverage the softwware for more advanced applications!
3) Gurus - Get to brush on a few tips, learn from a fellow Guru and finally have a daily reference for Xcelsius!

We think Loren did a great job and this book is currently rated #1 in our Xcelsius Guru Network bookshelf. It's simple a must have for the Xcelsius developer.


The Xcelsius Gurus
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