Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I read the 2nd Edition. Many other reviewers thought the book was really good. Hm...it has some interesting ideas for additional, future work I would like to do, but ...
1. I found it to be rather disorganized. He jumps around a lot in the book, and sometimes it is hard to follow his examples. He tries to do two things at the same time: explain the different options in Crystal Reports and go through a detailed example (which doesn't cover all of the options).
2. I got off to a bad start in the book right away because he gives the .NET project the same name as the report, which confuses my version of Visual Studio .NET (2003 EA). In the sample code that can be downloaded from Wrox's web site, he uses a different name for the .NET project.
3. His explanation of cross tab reports is a joke (and has some mistakes in it). Fortunately, he uses a good example(s) for the cross tab report(s) and a reasonably intelligent person can figure it out.
4. He doesn't cover some of the "fun" stuff in report design like sizing and aligning report objects. He doesn't give you good tips for rapidly developing reports (other than using the report experts). He has written another book for beginners which I haven't read. Perhaps he covers some of these things there.
5. He could use more examples and more detail on subreports in his book. The reviewer from Singapore, for example, might benefit from that.
6. He does a very good job of reviewing the capabilities of Crystal Reports .NET versus the full retail versions of Crystal Reports like versions 9 and 10.
7. He does a good job of showing how to use Crystal Reports within the Visual Studio .NET IDE (which a lot of reviewers liked). However, he mentions the context menu for the report designer several times but never gives a screen shot of the menu in the book. One of the first things I did was to make a screen shot of that menu by doing a right click on the report I was designing.
8. Folks, if this is the best we can do, I plan to write my own book(s), beginner and advanced.

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!

I used Crystal Reports in my last job, although I just worked from some reports a friend gave me. I'm now in a position where I need to do my own report development with Crystal Reports in .Net so I bought this book for guidance, and I'm glad I did. The early chapters are fast paced, so you can get to grip with the basics with ease. The later chapters build on this and go into depth discussing formulas, logic and data handling, and I now feel very comfortable in my ability to write reports to impress! Thanks Wrox.

This book glosses over many of the critical details to get your reports running smoothly in .NET. It is a very, very basic tutorial...and that's it.

Page-for-page, I got a lot of value out of this book, and quickly (2 work days, cover-to-cover, running and tweaking the downloaded examples.). It concisely covers exactly what the title says it does - CR.NET - not stand alone CR 9, nor Enterprise. It addresses an issue that both Microsoft and Crystal/Seagate documentation have always given short shrift to in earlier versions of CR - how the tool (CR.NET) is intended to be used in the context of the larger IDE (VS.NET).

Still, the bad reviews here are somewhat valid. The important legacy issue of porting old CR 7 and 8 reports into CR.NET is not addressed - even though the topic would be germane to the subject matter. Also, while I haven't had any troubles using SQL Server stored procs in CR.NET so far, I have to agree that the topic is important and germane enough to deserve specific discussion. God help me for saying this about a Wrox title, but it would have been worth making it a little thicker to cover these topics.

And hey, it's nice to see Wrox taking the time to let one author write a thin, coherent book instead of rushing out the thick, incoherent collections of chapter-length articles that they usually do.

I bought the book for the web forms chapter and I found it to be too brief. There is no information about dynamic select statements or parameters as the data source for the reports, only static data sources. The author uses windows forms when he covers these topics.
I am still searching for a good crystal reports.net reference.

MCSD, MCDBA

I have been developing applications using VB for the past 4 years and Crystal Reports has always been a point of frustration for me. I have tried to use the version that shipped with Visual Studio 6 and with poor functionality and no decent documentation (from Crystal or otherwise), I finally just gave in and bought Active Reports. When I started using .NET, I was happy to find Crystal Reports had been updated but still no manual and poor documentation. I was about to throw in the towel when I came across this book-- it provided the missing link and I am now integrating Crystal Reports into my applications and didn't have to buy any other software to do it. If I had a complaint, it would be that the chapter on data sources doesn't go into a lot of detail on ADO.NET, just how to use it with a report. So if you haven't worked with data sets before, you will probably need to read up on it [at their site] or other similiar sites or grab a book just on ADO.NET if you plan to use it extensively. All in all, it is the best book out there for every .NET developer who finds Crystal Reports as frustrating as I do sometimes!

after struggling with previous versions of Crystal and VB, I didn't expect too much out of .net but was pleasantly surprise. The tool itself still is playing catch up to the regular version of Crystal but is miles ahead of previous versions. Like most of big Bill's products, the manuals were scarce in .net and the documentation on Crystal is sad. I had bought the complete reference and it was thin on developer topics, so I was happy to find this book and it provides excellent coverage on report integration, but why didn't Crystal do this themselves?!? once again WROX has the best.

No muss, no fuss, just a short, straightforward exposition of Crystal Reports.Net and how to use it in Visual Studio.Net. This is a thin book (about 300 pages), but it covers both Windows Form reports and Web Form reports. The book won't change your life, but it will get you going on CR.Net. I recommend it strongly.

After having gotten pretty fed up with the increasingly sloppy work coming out of Wrox, I was pleasantly surprised by this title.
It's currently the only thing out there written specifically for CR.NET. At 325 pages (appendices and index included), it's length is appropriate for its subject (which, more than anything, is what I mean by "a step in the right direction"). It is well organized, written and edited, and I found it quite helpful in meeting an important deadline.

I highly recommend this title and hope it portends an overall improvement in future products from Wrox.