FWIW, I started with Brian Larson's book on SSRS 2008. It was okay. He walks you through setup, which helps. Also, his instructions are usually really easy to follow. One complaint - "wordy" doesn't even begin to describe it. He repeats the same steps for doing things like creating a dataset, etc (that you could probably do in your sleep after about the third time) seemingly forever. In fairness, though, when I e-mailed and asked him a question, he did answer.

The other thing I found disappointing about his book was the amount of "filler" stuff - for a beginner book, I'm not sure of the value of most of his appendices (and there are about 150 pages worth!) Hopefully his 2012 version is better.