Crystal Reports 8.5: The Complete Reference

List Price: $49.99 Discount Price: $25.83

Customer Reviews:

Not so great [Posted on 2002-12-10]
As you become more and more proficient, this book is more and more frustrating. There are so many things just touched on and not explained or not in the book at all!

Not much different than Crystal's own manual [Posted on 2003-03-14]
I purchased this book as a reference. Fortunately, I had a separate training course for learning the Crystal application. And I now teach the product.

It's a good reference. I truly haven't had a question yet regarding basic or advanced procedures in the application that I couldn't find. But I would not recommend it for learning the application. It is dense.

I'm also disappointed that it is not very different from the CR 8.0 manual published by Crystal Decisions. The layout and procession of the book are virtually the same! It could have included more tutorials, too.

One thing that I would love for any CR reference/manual to include is a list and description of all the formulas in the system. To my knowledge, this does not exist anywhere, even in Crystal's own documentation.

PURCHASING RECOMMENDATION
If you need a solid reference and didn't purchase manuals with Crystal, this will work. If you need to learn the product, get something else.

A good reference book [Posted on 2003-03-30]
I develop financial reporting applications for various companies using VB and VBA. Recently I have completed a financial reporting system completely within Access 2000 making extensive uses of Access's report objects.

Although the Access report object does its job well, it lacks a lot of power features, i.e., limited grouping capabilities, formula in text boxes is limited to a simply expression unless you make a call to UFD, then you would loss your object encapsulation, etc, The Data Report object is VB6 is still some what of a joke, but let not open this can of worms. Thus, I have chosen Crystals reports for my developing needs.

I find George Peck's Complete Reference series very helpful. The book has 800 pages to teach me every nuance of Crystal. This book does not teach me anything about VB coding nor does it contain a reference to the object model within the RDC or any of the other object models in Crystal. I didn't buy this book to learn how to code. The author noted in page 659 specifically that the book is not meant to teach you Visual Basic.

Overall, this book gets me up to speed quickly and it's a good reference source for my future needs. Personally, I don't find the crystal help files very helpful.

Who are you writing this book for? [Posted on 2003-11-13]
After reading positive reviews of this title, I decided to purchase the complete reference and was extremely disappointed. The most common problem with crystal books (or any other software application manual-excel, access, etc.) is that the author try's to appeal to all crystal report's users. There are generally three types of software user's out their, 1. database administrator/computer programmers who want reference manuals with excellent indexes. 2. Basic users who can get by with your classic "for dummies" title. 3. User's who don't understand VBA or SQL but want to be able to create reasonably advanced adhoc reports.
This title is to basic for the database administrator who would have to read 4 pages of babble to find the specific piece of information they need. There are no practice assignments for the beginner/intermediate report writer to do just that "practice". And when you do find a title that contains tutorials/assignments they are often to basic and lack real relevance in the business world. With the number of access, excel, crystal, etc. titles on the market you would think that there would be enough room to specifically appeal to the different types of software user's out their.

Poor Index, Missing key concepts, Garbage... [Posted on 2005-01-18]
I frequently use these reviews to select books of all types. I consider myself a power user able to learn rapidly from good texts. This book has not been very helpful for my work in Crystal Reports.

I need to be able to program Crystal Reports to perform a variety of complex reporting on databases that are completely denormalized. Thus, the ability to parse strings and execute stored procedures is critical.

This book completely fails to provide the information about built-in commands that I need. For instance, no information about string commands is present. No discussion of the use of arrays in Crystal Reports is provided.

I was deeply disappointed with this book.

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