Customer Reviews

Crystal Reports .NET Programming

5 star:		(27)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

Let's get this straight from the beginning--this is not a book about Crystal Reports 10, nor Crystal Reports 9. This is about Crystal Reports .NET, which is a different version altogether. The second part of this book does a great job of discussing the rich programming model of the CR.NET engine, and also indicates clearly the limitations of the CR.NET engine (CR.NET is far more limited than CR9 or CR10--that's why it's bundled with Visual Studio). The first part of this book is a very good resource for people who have not worked with Crystal Reports Design, or may be new to the Visual Studio interface. The numerous examples are given in both C# and VB.NET. This book was self-published and self-edited by the author, so you'll find an occasional typo. Save your money on the WROX Press book by David McAmis--that one is far more riddled with errors far less useful.

A GodSend!!

After spending $2000 for Crystal 10 Enterprise-I was appalled by the lack of documentation, examples and tutorials.
(I did find some examples on the Crystal Decisions website but had trouble translating them to my specific programming tasks.)

Most Crystal Report Books spend a lot of time on the Report Designer which in my humble opinion, from a programmer's perspective, is superfluous.

Brian excels in both explaining Crystal Reports and integrating it into .Net for programmers.

Brian gives you the object model and examples of specific methods. These are readily useable from VB.Net to ASP.Net.
By explaining the inner workings of Crystal; e.g., the two-step processing of report data, the reader can understand differences between items such as subtotals and running totals.

Within about 2 hours after perusing his chapter on exporting and deploying, I was able to set up a report in an asp.net application (with a few adjustments).

Consider me a fan. I look forward to other works from Brian.

I will do all I can to make his self-publishing profitable.

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.

I'm new to Crystal Reports .Net. To be more precise, I'm new to the whole .Net framework. Currently i'm using the book at my internship and it's helping my out ALOT. I've read several of the reviews for this book from grammatical errors to the author used the wrong font.

First of all, the author wrote this book about Crystal Reports .NET, not Crystal Reports 9 or 10. There is a difference.

Secondly, the author has a section within the first few pages of his book addressing the grammatical errors called "Grammatical Errors" (In Bold). After all, he did self-published the book and editing your own work is extremely hard. So those who were commenting about that are taking this review a little bit too seriously.

Yeah, the terminology ("web page" should be "ASP. NET Web App") is probably wrong but as you read on you'll know exactly what he means.

As far as examples, when you install Crystal Reports .Net it comes with example reports to work with. The author guides you on how to retrieve them in the first chapter of the book. He even gives you the full file extension (if you didn't change the default) of the report's location.

Anyhow, Crystal Reports .NET programming is an excellent book/reference for first time users AND professionals even though I don't consider myself to be one. He goes into detail as to what each Taps, components, viewers, and other features do; and how and when to used them.

The codes given in this book are well explained and easy to follow. Most codes access features that other books do not go into.

It is a well written, extremely thorough and comprehensive yet not too technical for first-time users to understand book to have and its well worth the listed price. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn how to use Crystal Reports .Net.

As a developer new to the .net world and Crystal Reports I was overwhelmed by the task of creating an application using both with just the help files.

Brian Bischof has done an excellent job of explaning and demonstrating solutions to this daunting task. This book is one of the best at getting to the meat of the matter I have read. After explaining the task to be tackled, there are excellent examples and sample code.

Thanks for writing this book, it has saved me from hours of frustration!

Not having done any Crystal Reports programming before, I found this book to be excellent! The examples were exactly what I needed and had several projects finished in no time. It's nice having both VB and C# examples in one place.

I also found the functions chapter to be helpful - the first reference I've ever seen to cover that many functions.

I would highly recommend this book - well worth the money.

First there isn't much information for crystal reports in .net out there. (There is an other book, but it didn't help me much)

But now things are looking better. CR .NET Programming Covers about all aspects from making a report over runtime changes to deploying your applications w crystal reports. And it has extensive code examples.

I'm working w CR in .NET for about a year now and exept for the first few chapters (starter stuff) i found things i didn't know (even big things) every few pages.
Impressive.

If you are struggeling w CR .NET or want to get more out of it you should have this.

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.

[...]

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 is an outstanding book that provides any .net developer exactly what they need to know to take full advantage of the version of Crystal Reports that comes with VS.NET. This book allowed me to ramp up and take full advantage of Crystal in just three days and will serve as an excellent reference as long as I use the product. I have read a lot of software books and I think this is the best written one that I have used. The only problem I've had with the book is that it isn't physically put together well; it's bound to tightly and poorly and pages are already falling out. It's good enough, however, that I'll buy another copy if this one totally falls apart.