It has been a busy month for Packt publishing, who have brought out three new books to help you with getting the most out of QlikView and Qlik Sense. This post rounds them up.

Until March 25th 2016 you can get any of these titles with a 30% discount.
Just buy direct from Packt and enter the code Vvja7 at check out.

Click here to visit the Packt site

Creating Stunning Dashboards with QlikView

Creating Stunning Dashboards

The first out of the gates, released at the end of October is this book by Julián Villafuerte. This book comes at QlikView from a UI angle and has a number of short, sharp and useful tips and tricks to spruce up your presentation. Many different chart types and techniques are covered, and not just from a ‘how to’ point of view, there is also guidance on when and why to use each chart type. I am appreciating this book from my first look at it, as it picks up on two things readers of this blog know I subscribe to; firstly that small details matter and also that text boxes are perhaps the most flexible data presentation object in your kit-bag. I’m looking forward to reading this book from cover to cover at some point soon. As Bill Lay mentions in his foreword, some people see the sole purpose of a QlikView app as delivering the correct numbers, but it is only good design that can really sell those numbers and bring clarity to them.

If you are yet to be convinced of this fact you should get this book.

QlikView Unlocked

QlikView Unlocked

Just arrived is this book by Roger Stone and Andrew Dove. This book gets big kudos from me, for mentioning our own AskQV site in the preface (thanks guys!). Like the previously mentioned Dashboards book, this one is a collection of bite-size tips, that you can dip into and just pick out bits that look interesting to you. That said though there is a logical flow through the book, from planning a deployment, setting up the environment, through building stuff to making sure you have tidied up at the end. In fact, it is the softer topics, such as the aforementioned preparation and planning, that set this book apart.

Most of the sections are not things that are particularly tricky, but aimed at relatively seasoned developers it picks up on lots of things that even they may be surprised to learn. Flicking through this book I can see nothing but good advice, and sections addressing problems I frequently come across when picking up other peoples code on client site.

Even if you think you are on the top of your QlikView game, I suspect you will learn more from this book.

Qlik Sense Cookbook

Qlik Sense Cookbook

The most recent Qlik book to be published at the time of writing (I notice there is another scheduled for December) is this one by Philip Hand and Neeraj Kharpate. I have a slight bias with this title, as it is the fifth that I have been technical reviewer on, and the first I have been given the honour of writing the foreword for.

As I say in my foreword, the past year and a half has been a roller coaster ride for those close to Qlik and it’s products. New features and functionality just keep coming, and Sense just keeps getting better. This book is the first dedicated to getting under the bonnet of the new tool (the previous Learning Qlik Sense focuses more on positioning the product and giving an overview of features). The cookbook style (which readers of Stephen Redmond’s QlikView equivalent will find familiar) means that many of the ‘recipes’ have code blocks that can simply be copied and pasted into Sense to make the examples work. Each exercise in the book demonstrates another facet of Sense. There are recipes for creating extensions, using the “single object configurator”, Snapshots and Stories, as well as the more run-of-the-mill use cases. Producing a book on a product that is evolving as quickly as Sense was always going to be a challenge, and you will find a chapter at the end of this book dealing exclusively with features that arrived with version 2.1.1.

If you have come from a QlikView background, and are finding Sense a bit disorientating, or you have just turned up to the Qlik party since Sense arrived, then there will be recipes for you in these pages.

Conclusion

It is important, I feel, that we all should strive to keep learning. This is particularly important in the tech field, where things can change so rapidly. With no official printed manual to accompany QlikView, before the arrival of QlikView 11 For Developers late in 2012, there were no decent text books to help guide those implementing solutions with QlikView. Since then however, the number of titles available has grown and every facet of QlikView and Qlik Sense development and deployment is covered.

Whilst you can get lots of information from Qlik Community and blogs, like this one, there is something good about sitting down with a physical book. The depth and breadth that topics can be covered in tends to be greater with a book also.

Isn’t it time you filled your bookshelf up a bit more?

Qlik Bookshelf