A friend of mine from my days at Ball Aerospace named John Ward wrote a book titled Practical Data Analysis and Reporting with BIRT. John was responsible for writing the reports we provided to customers of our network security monitoring service. He used that experience as a reason to learn more about BIRT, the Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools Eclipse-based reporting system.

If you have any interest in using an open source product to create reports, check out Practical Data Analysis and Reporting with BIRT. I think you can get moving with BIRT using this book faster than you can with the longer titles from AWL. John's blog contains many posts on using BIRT to design and create reports as well.