IBM Cognos TM1 Cookbook

Very detailed

Having recently taken on a TM1 Administrator role I have found this book to be useful at times. As an existing TM1 user with no IT Support this book has been helpful in certain areas on sucessfully creating Cubes, creating Dimensions and TI Processes. One thing I found a bit difficult to follow was the Rules & Feeder section, the book doesn't actually help you out if something doesn't feed properly. I think that this book is more for people who have TM1 experience rather than starting off from scratch. TM1 users and Developers who use the system every day will find this book helpful. I intend to use the receipes in this Cookbook to further develop my knowledge.

Apart from the very frustrating DRM on the Kindle version which means I cannot easily (or legally) copy any of the code in the text (please Amazon, I mean the Kindle uses .mobi format all you've done is to add a few unreconizable asterixes in the code!) this book represents excellent value for money. It basically regurgitates much of the IBM standard course material,only here you are paying <£20 for the Kindle version instead of the £2,000+ that IBM charge per course. Highly recommended, really enjoying this. By the way, even the publisher produces a DRM free version!

I have been working with TM1 for over 13 years. This is an expensive book with little that is not already in the manuals for free. I would disagree with some of the recommendations made in this book.I also own IBM Cognos TM1 The Official Guide by Karsten Oehler, Jochen Gruenes and Christopher Ilacqua, and I would advise people to buy that instead. The range of techniques and applications covered in this book make it a much better buy. I am a freelance TM1 developer / architect. I don't work for IBM, and therefore this is an unbiased recommendation.

Ok, I have not read the official IBM Cognos TM1 documentation, so I cannot make a first hand comparison between this book and that. Other reviewers have suggested that the book offers little different.Garg's offering might seem to naively and initially portray TM1 to be in part a souped up spreadsheet. Several sections show a typical spreadsheet layout, with a table populated with data. But TM1 goes far beyond being a pure spreadsheet. Crucially, it has scripts that run in the backend to hook up with the TM1 Data Server. The latter contains what IBM simply calls 'cubes'. An inspired choice of terminology. Compact, with a simple metaphoric visualisation. A cube is considered to be business data in some type of multi-dimensional format. This is not the lowest form of data. The cube is derived from underlying data sets residing in, for example, a CRM source database. The Data Server goes out to this and constructs a cube.The various user interfaces that the book spends much/most of its time on are the views that TM1 lets you have for the cubes. Kudos to IBM for eschewing complex jargon. If I do seem to be emphasising this, it is because notation and terminology can and probably will affect how you use a software package. The simpler and more self evident the jargon, the easier it is for you to mentally build upon it and to leverage off the user interface.The user interface shows how to make a cube. Quite different from a traditional relational database approach of making interrelated tables and using standard normal forms. Arguably, IBM's approach with the cube may be more intuitive for the business user unversed in database theory. In and of itself, you might want to carefully peruse this book, to see if this approach is easier for you. Where possibly you can apply your business expert knowledge in an easier way.

I bought this book, because the recommendations said that it was not advanced enough. Only real tutorial that I have found so far. You want to learn TM1, buy it and work your way through