Crystal Reports .NET Programming

List Price: $34.95 Discount Price: $323.70

Customer Reviews:

Need to know what CR does on the object level? this is the book. [Posted on 2006-07-26]
If you need to know what's going on under the hood of Crystal reports, this book is a must have.

I had a requirement that a report be able to draw data through a stored procedure from 1 of 4 versions of a SQL Server 2000 Databases determined at runtime. Without this book I would have been forced to use the Push method.

Thanks to this book I was able to write the code to dynamically modify the login information, set the parameters, redirect the data source, and other things inside the ReportDoc object and other objects. I would have never found the UML diagrams and code I needed to track down what to change.

There is nowhere on the Net that had what I needed to know about Crystal Reports, this book does.

Crystal Reports [..] [Posted on 2007-02-15]
If you want to create professional looking reports using Crystal Reports, this is the book to read. It is easy to read, and examples are excellent for all programmers.
I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in using Crystal Reports to generate professional looking reports in a short period of time.

Not bad - not good, but good support! [Posted on 2007-04-21]
Like many other people I purchased Visual Studio 2005 and tried to use the bundled version of Crystal Reports but found the supplied and online documentation to be inadequate. I bought this book because the description references the bundled version of Crystal Reports and also that it covered both the declarative and programatic approaches to developing reports.

Having read much of the book I find that all the examples and screen shots are from the stand-alone version of Crystal Reports with no attempt to accomodate those readers using the bundled version. In the majority of explanations I am forced to explore the bundled interface trying to find the feature the book is explaining. Sometimes I was unable to find a feature leaving me to wonder if the feature was excluded from the bundled version or if I simply didn't look hard enough.

Some examples simply don't work. The explanation on changing the connection info programaticaly doesn't work with the bundled version - it still reads from the original connection. I don't know if this is because the example is bad or it simply doesn't work with the bundled version.

In addition to the versioning confusion (created by Business Objects admittedly, but not resolved by this book) there are numerous gross grammatical errors in the book. Someone needs to slap the editor awake because that's his/her job and they didn't do it. I'll give you a couple of the most egregious errors.

'The layout tab effects[sic] your interaction with the report designer.'
'This insures[sic] that no matter how short your line is,...'

And yes, I don't have a professional editor either so don't start harping on about spelling or grammatical errors in this review :-)

Now that I read the acknowledgements I see Brian didn't employ a professional editor; two of his friends edited some of the chapters. It shows.

I decided to upgrade to the developer edition of Crystal Reports to gain access to some features I need so perhaps one of my major critisisms of the book will go away and the examples will actually match what I see. But if you think this book will help you learn the bundled version of Crystal Reports you will see a limited return on your investment.

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great book. terrible product. [Posted on 2007-09-15]
The book is outstanding. packed full of real time, practical info. Brian's online forum is the best.

The problem is crystal reports itself. It repeatedly crashes my VS2005. Business Objects is selling an enterprise server product which delivers CR reports thru the browser. My guess is BO wants to discourage users from using asp.net to access their reports.

As someone using CR for the last 6 weeks to design reports, I would much prefer to ditch the product and try other Windows reporting alternatives. It is totally tedious when working with reports with a lot of columns and total breaks. snap to grid does not always work. Have not been able to figure out how to use one report as a template for another ( ex. the dollar version of a report is a lot like the unit version. problem is I have to code each from scratch. With 12 monthly columns and 5 total breaks, this is hours of needless work. )

BO tech support is brutal. Basically you have to pay $2500 per year for phone support. Otherwise you will waste too much time figuring out how to do what you want with the product. Then for the enterprise version, for the same reason, you will have to pay for another tech support contract.

Very good reference book [Posted on 2008-07-23]
After finally managing to get hold of a copy of this book, I have to say that it has saved me a ton of time and energy. Within a few days I was able to create production reports using Visual Basic 2005 and Crystal Reports. The second half of the book was much more valuable to me than the first because it deals with programming reports directly through VB code. I did find the chapter on deploying reports is somewhat dated. I had to go to the SAP website to get up-to-date information on how to do this. This is understandable, considering that the latest edition of the book is from 2004. Brian should definitely produce a new edition to account for nuances in the newer versions of .NET.

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