Professional Crystal Reports for Visual Studio .NET, 2nd Edition

List Price: $39.99 Discount Price: $8.88

Customer Reviews:

Not worth the money [Posted on 2005-10-20]
This book has an annoying trait of explaining super basic things as if you had no knowledge of computers. It tells you step by step how to add a project. Select File -> New -> etc. Which is fine if all material is covered with this detail. But it's not. The harder stuff is, or this stuff that's is impossible to arrive at with clicking, is glossed over. For instance, there's a section that tells you how to use Crystal Parameters with values entered in a textbox. A very useful thing. The explanation is laborious on how to add components on the form but when he gets to the code part, he says, "You can now use this code to set you parameter fields" No mention of where this code goes. How could they assume you've never turned on a computer before with the Select File -> New bit and then assume you know where this code goes. It makes this book useless. It's one of things that is just infuriating. Who do they think the audience is for this book? If you know VS you know how to add a project, for Christ's sake. If you know Crystal you know how to make parameters. The reason you buy this book is to see how the two work together. WTF!

.NET reporting in a day [Posted on 2005-10-30]
Good reference and tutorials for designing templates and adding them to your own apps to view and print reports. Could rename it ".NET reporting in a Day" as that is all it took for me. I reccomend this book.

This book is not good [Posted on 2005-12-28]
Actually I purchased this book few months back. Today my opinion is this book is not upto the mark. It is only blah blah blah. No topic is covered in detail. I needed to search web for many things after reading this book. He is nowhere discussing crystal reports SDKs in detail. We wont get any overview of crystal reports SDKs provided with visual studio.

Disappointing for a 2nd Edition [Posted on 2006-02-17]
The book is a reasonable resource.

I was disapointed in the number of typos and errors in the code in the book. I was more disappointed in the lack of mention of these errors in the errata section of the web-site.

Unfortunately this has been my experience with the last few books I purchased so perhaps that's just what to expect.

The text is clear and easy to understand. It covers the basics of creating a report and covers most of the features in at least a cursory way and others in depth.

Even though disappointed I think the book is a useful resource.

Lacks consistency in explanations... [Posted on 2006-05-04]
I agreed with many of the prior reviewers when they stated that the book doesn't cover many options and in some examples they are covered completely and other examples jump around and lack the same "follow through" in the lesson as the prior examples. I also found that included screenshots were not consistent as well. Often when I was expecting a screenshot because the explanation given in the text was not so clear, no screenshot existed. In Chapter 3 the author has you use an example from Chapter 2 and in the SubReports section, the correct example could not be found. I found the example stated in the text but it did not contain the example shown in the screenshot.

In my opinion, when I purchase a book to learn a new software application that is 1) expensive, and 2) difficult to figure out, I expect consistency in a text this way I come to know what is expected by the person teaching. This book lacked that. If I had been somewhat knowledgeable with Crystal Reports prior to reading this text, it might be a different story altogether, but that wasn't my case. Final note, the author doesn't state what .NET code he will be using. I came to find out that its VB.NET, unfortunately for me I'm a C# programmer. I figured it out but I probably wouldn't not have purchased the book if I had known that from reading the covering or book description.

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