Tableau Dashboard Cookbook

I have only made it to page 68 of this book - DO NOT waste your time or money. It's an incoherent mess that shows no signs of having been edited or reviewed prior to publication.Illustrations are in black and white. Color versions are provided in a downloadable PDF but with no indexing or cross-referencing, so you have to guess at where you are. By Chapter 2, the illustrations in the physical book do not match the ones in the PDF. I didn't go any farther.Page 68 is significant, actually, because that's where the whole thing just falls apart. it looks like this section of the book was rewritten, because the example you're working on up to that point changes on page 69, with no warning.I'm giving up and likely returning the book. Maybe the 2nd printing will fix some of this - don't know if it's worth the trouble to find out.

I used this book with an online course from Cousera and am very glad for the learning and examples I received from it.

I'm only into the 2nd chapter and so far I have encountered broken links or missing data for most of the examples. Also, the Grouping example diverges into a completely separate example after step 29 (makes no sense). Also, inconsistent verbiage ...author uses the standard "pill" term correctly, but then randomly throws in "lozenge" to describe the same thing. That by itself wouldn't set me off, but combined with the other existing issues I'm seeing makes me think this book has been poorly edited and rushed to be released. Wish I would have saved my money!

Let’s start with the good stuff. Personally I loved this book and the main reason is because it is very hands-on: there are a lot of examples (or recipes if you follow the cookbook doctrine) that guide you step-by-step through the features of Tableau. For readers inexperienced with Tableau – such as myself – this is a great way to discover the product without being overwhelmed by its many features. Each recipe starts with a short introduction – not too long so it doesn’t get tedious – and then dives directly into the action. At the end there is a small recap of what you just did and how it works and there are optionally some pointers to further references. The book is limited on theory but overloaded with practicalities, which was very appealing to me. I felt I learned a great deal about Tableau by reading this book, but I also realized I just learned the basic functionalities of the product. That’s why this book may not be suited for already advanced users of Tableau; they may not find a lot of new information in this book.Now on to the bad stuff. Quite early on in the book – somewhere in chapter 2 – it became very clear that this book was badly edited. There are no spelling or grammar mistakes – not that I know of – but sometimes screenshots are switched or even wrong. One time a recipe – which is essentially a bulleted list of action points – jumped to the end while skipping a few steps. Sometimes when following the recipe step-by-step, you achieve a different result than what is displayed in a screenshot. Most of the time you can work around those issues by using your mind a bit and by comparing with (hopefully correct) screenshots. It can get annoying after a while, but it didn’t stop me from reading the book (unlike some other people...) because there is still very great content inside it. But you would think that with 4 reviewers, 3 proofreaders and 10 (!) editors mistakes like these would have been avoided.All in all, I recommend this book to people new to Tableau. They will definitely learn enough by this book to take their first steps with Tableau. A job well done by the author, but shame on you Packt Publishing for all those mistakes. Fire those editors please.