Conventions used in this book

The purpose of this book is to familiarize users with the BIRT Report Designer. In order to do so, I have decided to alternate between two different scenarios in order to demonstrate the capabilities of BIRT to familiarize you, the reader, with BIRT features, and to allow you an opportunity to follow along.

One set of reports will be built using the Classic Cars example database that comes with every BIRT distribution. This gives us an opportunity to allow you to follow along with examples and try them out on your own. The data schema used in Classic Cars is a simple schema, but it will require at least a basic understanding of SQL to follow along. This will allow me to give you some basic reporting examples such as listing reports, drill down reports, some basic charts, and some of the other BIRT features such as parameters, scripting, and the BIRT report emitters.

However, unlike most other books, I am also providing you an opportunity to follow along with a real life reporting scenario as well. With cooperation from the Eclipse BIRT Project Management Committee, I am also including examples of reports for the BIRT Bugzilla database. I feel these are beneficial to readers not only as a source of learning, but as an example of how the BIRT platform can be used in a real world scenario. This lets the user know that a whole lot of theory and sales pitches aren't the only thing BIRT is good for, but also demonstrates some real world usage of BIRT. This also gives us a chance to demonstrate some of the more advanced capabilities of BIRT itself.