I bought this product in order to develop a dozen reports with formatting, aggregate data and pivots.



After reading the four first chapters I knew enough to develop and deliver the reports. If you skip the cultural initial chapter you might be able to be up and running in less than a day. The rest of the chapters I didn't need since they dealt with peculiar situations I didn't encounter.



The code examples work for VS2005 and VS2008 yet I discovered for myself that most of the code is unnecessary for VS2008; If you look at the properties of your objects in design mode you'll see you can do most of the work at design time.



The tone of the book is slightly humourous and I have no problem with that as long as the book fulfills my needs. In fact, despite a short deadline and the pressure that goes with it, I did appreciate it.