Customer Reviews

Special Edition Using Crystal Reports 10

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

 

 

As to what others have said:
A reference - I disagree. Too much talk-talk gets in the way of finding anything quickly. Also the index is not as detailed as the text. For example I don't find an index reference to the "verify database" command but I'm sure it's mentioned in the book (somewhere!!). The Crystal reports online help is much better reference, it's more concise and organized to find specifics, the hallmark of a *reference*

Poorly Written - not.

Tedious - in the extreme.

My Spin:
The book addresses every nit and noid, thus making it difficult to find or learn things quickly. It's like trying to swim across the lake but you have to dive to the bottom constantly. And they bring up so much stuff they end up not really teaching or describing it adequately. I'm not so much learning Crystal Reports as I am being overwhelmed by exposure to every menu item and dialog in the system! It's kinda like an 800 page demo. One thing I am not getting out of this book is how to "program" in Crystal - and as an experience programmer, it's syntax is confusing.

I want to "get started quickly" - after all the basics of CR is rather basic. And later I want to "learn more in depth". And over time I want to look up things I forgot. This book just doesn't cut it.

Finally:
This book is OK if you have the time and patience and need to learn it all from scratch. It very "linear" in my view significantly adding to the tedium factor.

I had used Crystal Reports in a few projects previously and was tasked with using it again in a large upcoming initiave. I decided to review the current books out there to see what could best help me get back up to speed and give me a deep enough level of material that I could continuously learn from - this book is it.

The Book covered Crystal Report Design in a thorough way that let me get back up to speed quickly and the tips and tricks provided in the chapters were great in showing me how to create Crystal reports in an optimal way. The book took me through all the necessary preliminaries like data-source connections, field selection, grouping, filtering, sorting, etc and then led me to advanced features like Cross-tabs, Report Templates, Charting and Business Views (we use Crystal Enterprise too).

Unlike the other books I reviewed on the market, this one enabled me to not only create great reports using Crystal Reports but also taught me how to deliver those over the web through my custom application - a huge time saver and as mentioned provided great coverage of the other Crystal (or Business Objects) products so that I could actually construct a growth plan for my Crystal Enterprise infrastructure.

Over-all - highly recommended. AS

I am a beginner at Crystal Reports. I bought two other books before this one and I was left frustrated by both of them. I bought this book and within one day I was at least able create and edit reports. But this book is so poorly edited its laughable. It makes learning from this book a lot more difficult than it has to be. The book was obviously written by several different authors, some more capable than others. One chapter I am understanding everything on the first read and the next I am completely befuddled having to reread sections four or five times and finally figuring out what to do on my own. I get the sense that the book was hastily rehashed for this software version and the reader is at times left trying to make sense of instructions for earlier releases. There is hardly any sense of continutiy between the chapters and some exercises refer to prodedures that are yet to be covered. The book is rife with typos and it constantly references illustrations that are located pages away. Whats up with that? It wasn't to save paper. If the redundant paragraphs and unnecessarily wordy sentences were properly edited we could have saved a tree per book.
Que and its parent, Pearson are highly respected publishers. Its hard to believe they would release a $50 book of such poor quality. Nevertheless, the book delivered what I needed. If you are at your wit's end tryng to learn Crystal Reports consider buying this book for lack of anything more understandable.

I bought this book because of its 5 star reviews. Well, all I can say is, I must have read a different book than the previous reviewers, or they must have been friends of the author, because I can't believe anyone would rate this book highly.

It is long, tedious, poorly written and shows signs of not being proof-read properly:
* Contains lots of lists and descriptions to fill up space without adding conceptual content (do we really need to see every field on a form in a list?).
* Poorly structured. All of the narrative appears at the front of a section followed by examples that don't properly illustrate the text.
* Many examples contain errors and are difficult to follow, again, because they aren't properly tied into the narrative.

I have been working with Crystal Reports and Crystal Enterprise for over 4 years now and this is one of the few books I'd recommend to customers and coworkers who are about to develop distribute complex reporting solutions to a audience of any size. This book covers a great deal of areas and allows the developer to grow from beginner to advanced in a farely short period of time. A must read for anyone who develops reports.

I'm an IT graduate and am very accustomed to reading technical resources. This book is one of the worst I have seen. The screen caps that are referenced in the text are hardly ever on the same page as the text. Lots of the descriptions about radio buttons are a twist on the descriptions given by the environment. Clumsy book. I don't know what to recommend as replacement, but not worth the $50 I bought it for. I wouldn't even pay $25 for it.

A confidently recommended, start-to-finish, 888-page reference for users of Crystal Reports and the entire suite of Enterprise Reporting products. Includes content, tutorials and samples for reporting within the Microsoft Visual Studio.NET environment and on the SAP Business Information Warehouse. Author and Crystal Reports expert Neil Fitzgerald has a distinctive flair for providing even the most novice computer operator or programmer with a completely "user friendly" text that can be quickly and readily absorbed. Anyone dealing with Crytal Reports (or any other aspect of the Enterprise Reporting softwares) would be well advised to add Special Edition Using Crystal Reports 10 to their professional reference shelf.

Remember how computers were supposed to get rid of paper. Everything was going to be processed like magic and only the conclusions needed to be reviewed.

OK, so all of your data is in a database and it's your job to do INFORMATION DELIVERY and to create BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE. How do you take all that data and present it in a manner that is timely enought and easily understood enough for management to understand and make decisions. Of course you could use the standard reports that come with the software package you're using. But they are not what management wants. Of course you could write SQL statements to get at the data, and then program what's printed or displayed. But what a pain.

Enter Crystal Reports with its drag and drop philosophy of building the reports to provide the information you need. The book is broken into two main parts. The first half or so is oriented to content creation, how to collect an analyze the information you have available. The second is on distribution of this data through all the means available today from the printed page, the web, and the new .NET /COM channel.