Natural Synergies, Inc.’s president, Oleg Troyansky, reviews “QlikView for Developers Cookbook”, a new book by Stephen Redmond and published by Packt Publishing.

Packt Publishing continues its tradition of publishing QlikView technical books. After a very successful educational book, “QlikView 11 of Developers”, written by two extraordinary QlikView masters, Barry Harmsen and Mike Garcia, they recently published a new book that provides hundreds of useful examples and detailed recipes for all kinds of unusual solutions implemented in QlikView.

“QlikView for Developers Cookbook” should find its prominent place on every serious QlikView developer’s desk. This is a portable guide to many “secrets of trade” that have been mastered by a very creative QlikView practitioner, through years of developing advanced QlikView applications.

While it’s not a typical tutorial book that takes the reader from the basics to the advanced topics, the Cookbook offers hundreds of specific solutions, from curiously obscure to tremendously useful, and none are too obvious.

Stephen Redmond, a brilliant QlikView practitioner, is showing his magic tricks, one after another, and unlike any other magicians, he immediately reveals to the audience how the trick works. The book is even structured this way. In each chapter, after the problem at hand is presented, the reader will find a section “Getting Ready”, where each exercise is prepared with a simple load script and some initial configurations.

Then, the next section “How to do it”, shows the trick by walking the reader through the “magical” configuration or a setup that makes the trick work. Most training manuals stop there, assuming that the rest is obvious, which is rarely the case.

Stephen is going further by adding a section “How it works”, which provides a nice explanation of the settings and the underlying logic that made the trick possible. Furthermore, when there is another lesson to be learned, an additional “There’s more…” section includes any additional related information. I found this form of explanation extremely educational. I don’t just blindly learn HOW to do something, I’m also learning WHY should it work and WHAT else do I need to know about it.

As an experienced QlikView practitioner, I didn’t expect to learn a lot of new stuff, and I was proven wrong. Many of the ideas in the Cookbook looked new and refreshing for me. I truly believe that every serious QlikView developer will find a lot of interesting insight in this book. I certainly did.

Oleg Troyansky
President
Natural Synergies, Inc.