The book provides a reasonable introduction into BIRT. In several sections the examples are difficult to follow. My biggest problem with this book is that it has the worse index I have seen in a technical book. I rely on the index of a book like this to be able to quickly locate the relevant pages of a particular feature that I am trying to figure out, however, this book has such a poor index that I often would look things up in the table of contents. The index is near useless which makes this book less valuable as a reference book. Overall I was not that impressed.