A few months back I purchased the book “Expert Cube Development with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services” by Chris Webb, Alberto Ferrari and Marco Russo.  I recently finished reading this book and thought I’d share my impressions.

• I recommend this book to anyone who has a solid understanding of SSAS, works with SSAS on a regular basis and wants to take their cube development and optimization to the next level.  This is not a beginner level book. 
• The content of this book is very well-organized.  The first chapter provides an overview of basic dimensional modeling concepts: Ralph Kimball vs. Bill Inmon, dimensions and facts, star schema vs. snowflake schema, etc.  The remaining chapters are all specific to SSAS starting with building dimensions and cubes, creating measures and measure groups, adding transactional data to fact tables, enhancing the cube with MDX calculations, implementing currency conversions in SSAS, query performance tuning, implementing security, “productionization”, and monitoring cube performance and usage. 
• This book does not focus on  menus or user interface (it is assumed that you work with SSAS regularly and already know this); nor does it provide an overview of every feature SSAS offers.  Instead, the authors focus on best practices (from their perspectives) gained from years of experience working with SSAS. 
• The book describes common scenarios and challenges encountered during cube development and provides reasons why one approach may be better than another and when you’d want to select one option over another.  Many other books I’ve read explain the features and options but never delve into a detailed explanation of the pros/cons like this book does.
• Links to additional sources of information such as blog posts, white papers and other reference materials are shared throughout the book.  I have not read all of the additional reference materials but the ones I did read were high-quality.

I personally have about 8 months of experience working with SSAS – this book provided me with lots of good tips and recommendations that are not ‘common knowledge’ and can only be gained through years of experience with the product.  I feel that this book is a great investment and a resource I can leverage well into the future.