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Power BI/AI Book Roundup

Here’s another one of my occasional posts about books I’ve been sent free copies of. Full disclosure: as always, these aren’t reviews as such, they’re more like free publicity in return for the free books and I don’t pretend to be unbiased; also the Amazon UK links have a affiliate code in that gives me a kickback if you buy any of these books.

The AI Value Playbook, Lisa Weaver-Lambert

What am I doing covering an AI book here? Lisa is an ex-colleague of mine at Microsoft and I respect her opinions. Also, I suspect like a lot of you, I have mixed feelings about the current AI boom: I can see the value in AI but I can also see the vast amount of hype and the obviously ridiculous claims being made. More than anything I see senior executives talking confidently about a subject I’m sure they don’t understand, and that is clearly a big problem. This book aims to help solve that problem by providing a practical guide to AI for non-technical leaders, in the form of a series of case studies and interviews with entrepreneurs and C-level people in the AI space. This is a very readable book – Lisa has talked to a lot of interesting, knowledgeable people – and the format makes it a lot more palatable for the target audience of your boss’s boss’s boss than your average tech book. As a technical person who isn’t by any means an AI expert I also enjoyed reading it.

The Complete Power BI Interview Guide, Sandielly Ortega Polanco, Gogula Aryalingam and Abu Bakar Nisa Alvi

Spend any time on public Power BI forums and you’ll see a lot of questions from people who want to know how to start a career in Power BI or get tips for Power BI interviews; as a result I’m sure there’s a big market for a book like this. It’s a mix of technical topics (the type that you might be asked about in a technical interview for a Power BI job) and non-technical advice such as how to network on LinkedIn, negotiate salaries and acecpt or reject a job offer. That might seem a bit of a strange combination but it works and the advice is both detailed and very sensible, so as a result I would have no hesitation in recommending this to anyone trying to get a job as a Power BI developer.