A list of books and additional tools you may need to work with Pentaho Reporting as efficiently as possible.

Books

Pentaho Reporting 3.5 for Java Developers
Will Gorman

This book shows you how to replace or build your enterprise reporting solution from scratch with Pentaho's Reporting Suite. Through detailed examples, it dives deeply into all aspects of Pentaho's reporting functionalities, providing you with the knowledge you need to master report creation.

Pentaho Solutions: Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing with Pentaho and MySQL
Roland Bouman, Jos van Dongen

The book covers all components of the Pentaho BI Suite. You'll learn to install, use, and maintain Pentaho-and find plenty of background discussion that will bring you thoroughly up to speed on BI and Pentaho concepts.

This book will guide you through the process of creating a data-warehouse. It teaches how to set up a Mondrian Cube and the supporting ETL processes to fill the data-warehouse.

Pentaho Kettle Solutions: Building Open Source ETL Solutions with Pentaho Data Integration
Roland Bouman, Matt Casters, Jos van Dongen

A complete guide to Pentaho Data-Integration. If you need to fill a data-warehouse or want to create a transformation to feed a report, this book is a indispensable companion.

Additional Tools you may need to use Pentaho Reporting to its fullest.

Mondrian Schema Workbench

Mondrian is the OLAP (Online-Analytical-Processing) engine provided by Pentaho. Pentaho Reporting can use either this OLAP engine as data source or any other data source that supports XML/A or OLAP4J as access method.

The Mondrian Schema Workbench provides a graphical user interface to create Mondrian Schema Definitions. These definitions are required if you intend to use Mondrian OLAP data sources.

Pentaho Metadata editor

The Pentaho Metadata Layer is a abstraction layer that provides Business Users a friendly way to query relational data sources. This data source greatly simplifies the query design process and makes your data accessible to your business users without drowning them in obscure technical query languages.

The Metadata Editor is the designer to create Pentaho Metadata Schemas. A working Metadata Model is also a prerequisite to use the Web-Based Adhoc-Query-And-Reporting Tool provided by the Pentaho BI-Server.

Pentaho Data Integration - Kettle

Data Integration tools are specialized in accessing even the most obscure data and to transform this data into other formats.

With Pentaho Data Integration you are be able to design transformations that feed your report. This way you can combine multiple data sources like databases, web-service lookups, external files and more into a single normalized stream of data. The reporting engine can use that stream of data in a report.

JPivot and Pentaho Analyzer

These tools are analytical query tools aimed to provide a swift and efficient interactive view on the data stored in a OLAP cube. Both JPivot and Pentaho Analyzer are optimized for interactive analytical queries.

The MDX query used by these tools can be fed into a Pentaho Report to produce a static view on this data. Pentaho Reporting is not (and does not aim to be) a replacement for Analytical clients.

Pentaho Reporting's strength lies in its ability to create distributable documents that are layouted perfectly to the specification of a content designer. Pentaho Reporting focuses on making all output documents look as closely to the original layout as possible. This places the ability to create highly interactive clients based on such documents out of scope for a document oriented reporting engine.

Pentaho Web-Based Adhoc-Query-And-Reporting Tool

Pentaho's Web-Based Adhoc-Query-And-Reporting Tool uses a existing Pentaho Metadata to query a database and to automatically generate a report definition based on the input the user provides.

Dashboards

A dashboard is a interactive information display used to monitor the state of business processes or the company itself. Dashboards are aimed at the upper and middle management to receive regular updates on the state of the their business.

Reports can be part of a dashboard. Dashboards need to have fast response times and large amount of interactivity between the components of the dashboard. This generally makes it difficult to use a single report as a dashboard and to meet these requirements at the same time.