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"Very good reference book", 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.

"great book. terrible product.", 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.





"Not bad - not good, but good support!", 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.

[...]

"Crystal Reports [..]", 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.

"Need to know what CR does on the object level? this is the book.", 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.

Read this reviews before You buy...

"Best and only worthwhile Crystal Reports Reference", If you are thinking about implementing Crystal Reports into a .NET application, get this book. Since Crystal's own online documentation and web site for the product is worthless, this book is a neccessity. Examples are concise. Contains nice gothcha's I wish I had known about. There are gaps in the book but the basics to get going are there. Brian did an awesome job compiling this book with his limited resources and it would be nice if a big publisher would pick this up and create a newer expanded edition.

"Of Immense Value", This book explained how to deploy Crystal Reports applications in an absolutely clear and concise manner (see pgs. 405-411), information I could not track down anywhere else. Bravo, Brian. Those pages were worth the price of your book, and the rest of the book (which is just as useful) is just a bonus as far as I'm concerned. Highly recommended. Good work, and thank you.

"This guy is NOT with the program", You know, the program that says all technical books have to explain programming in excruciating detail for non-programmers, even when the book title says "for experienced programmers"? The program that results in books on one small topic will thereby be expanded to 1600 pages, so we can charge $40 or $50? THAT program! I'm thinking this guy published it himself. It's pretty darn clear and well-written, with very few grammatical errors in spite of the lack of a professional editing staff. If you're a VB.Net programmer, or ASP.Net, or C# programmer, and you already have adequate reference books for doing the rest of your work, and all you need is a good & thorough reference to Crystal Reports, THIS is the book you want to get.

"Quick Customer Service", I've just purchased a copy of this book. On first inspection, the contents look promising. Howerver, the quality control is poor; pages 215 - 246 are missing.

Update:

The good news is that the author (and self publisher) is very responsive. I sent an email complaining of the missing pages and within a few hours received a response from the author. He's offered to provide a replacement. He's a good guy.

"Top notch. Don't wring your hands, just buy this book.", I cannot believe anyone who has actually read this book has given it less than 5 stars. I am a veteran software engineer and application developer who has been using CR.NET from day one of its existance (and many other report writers long before it). Nonetheless, it is ridiculous how much I have learned from this book. Let's face it, the MSDN content on Crystal Reports for .NET is weak; I know, because I have read all of it. This book not only fills the gap, it cracks the walls on both sides.

This is the only book on the planet that covers CR for the Visual Studio developer this well. If you use Visual Studio, no matter which language, and you use Crystal Reports, you need this book. And don't use the excuse that it is too late in the cycle for the current version and you are waiting for VS 2005, and the 2005 version of this book. If you have to write any new reports with CR.NET between now and when 2005 ships, this book will a) save you a lot of time and b) make your reports better than before. The $25 this book costs is a joke for the value packed in these pages.

Final note: Brian has self-published a technical book that shames the major publishers of technical books available today. You can really tell that this was something he worked very hard on to get right and he succeeded in a big way. Encourage him to do this again; buy the book if you need this valuable info.