Miguel Gaspar - Learning Pentaho CTools

Miguel Gaspar started working at Webdetails about 3 years ago, some time before the acquisition of Webdetails by Pentaho. He was a consultant in the Implementation team and his work involved developing dashboard solutions as part of services. He is now acting as the technical owner of some of the Implementations projects as part of the Webdetails team in Pentaho. He likes to be as professional as possible, but in an informal way. One of his favorite hobbies is learning and his particular areas of interest are: business analytics, predictive analysis and big data, augmented reality, and cloud computing. He likes to play and is a huge martial arts fan and also one of the worst soccer players ever. He is married and a parent of two young and lovely daughters, who would like to spend more time playing like crazies with him. He also likes to spend time with friends or just having a drink and a good talk with someone else, if possible with his family at his side. He really hates liars.

I am really grateful to my wife for all the support and also to my daughters for letting me compensate them for the time I spent writing the book while I should be spending the time with them, playing and laughing. I also want to thank all the reviewers and the team that worked on the book to make it better.

Dan Keeley is an open source analytics advocate who has been working with Pentaho for nearly 10 years. He is now running his own company, building a team specializing in fast turnaround analytics. He has reviewed books on Pentaho Reporting and Pentaho Data Integration.

Sadakar Pochampalli has been working as a BI consultant, and has around 4 years of experience with the Pentaho BI suite (all the modules) and the Japsersoft BI suite (all the modules). He is a postgraduate with a masters in computer applications from Bankatlal Badruka College for IT, Hyderabad, Telangana. He was awarded by Badruka (BBCIT) college with E.Balagurusamy gold medal for his outstanding performance during his postgraduation. He has been involved in end-to-end BI solutions using the Pentaho BI suite to meet the customers' expectations. He is passionate about learning open source and enterprise BI technologies as well an enthusiast of working on big data technologies. He often says to his friends, colleagues, and family that learning things never exhausts the mind . He has successfully delivered around 20 end-to-end BI projects using Pentaho and Jaspersoft. He has also trained more than 200 folks, from freshers to the CEOs of companies.

This is the first book he has reviewed. He is the author of two active blogs: http://pentaho-bi-suite.blogspot.in/ (Pentaho BI Suite) and http://jasper-bi-suite.blogspot.in/ (Jaspersoft BI Suite).

I would like to express my special thanks to the author of this book Miguel Gaspar and Packt Publishing for giving me this wonderful opportunity to review the content of book to make me part of this project. I enjoyed doing it as I have been working on the same technology for the past few years. Hope you find this book very useful and you will also enjoy learning CTools.

Umang Shah did his MSc (IT) at the Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology (DA-IICT), which is among India's top tier institutes. After completing his masters of science, he worked in a startup firm, Cogbooks, as a BI-ETL developer and has working here for the last 3 years. As a startup culture, he worked on multiple roles and with multiple technologies. Pentaho, Amazon-EC2, and Cassandra are major parts of them. He writes a blog for helping Pentaho community: https://shahumang.wordpress.com.

This is the very first book I am reviewing, so I want to thank Packt Publishing for giving me this opportunity.

Using Pentaho allows you to build a complete analytics solution, and CTools brings an advanced flexibility to creating custom reports and making the most out of Pentaho. You can build your analytics dashboards/reports in an advanced and remarkable way. I can not avoid saying that Pentaho and CTools are two of the fastest and most amazing tools for building a complete solution that really takes your business to another level, and you probably would not be able to do with any other tool on the market.