Crystal Reports .NET Programming

I am new to Crystal Reports.NET and have pretty much found this to be the most comprehensive book on the subject out there!There seems to be many differences in regular Crystal Reports and Crystal Reports.NET and Brian's book, being specific to CR.NET, was just the piece to the puzzle I was looking for. Just scanning 2 pages in initially opening the book solved 2 issues that I could not find anywhere else on the Internet searching Google!Our manager has attempted to find a training resource locally who could teach a class on CR.NET and has come up empty. There seem to be plenty of CR classes, but none specific to CR.NET.Obviously whoever said the market was flooded with this information should be looking for another job.Bravo to Brian for offering his knowledge to the public. As I have been branded one of the CR.NET resources at work, I am sure this book will rarely leave the top of my desk.I hope he will decide to releases updated editions and pass along his future learnings of CR.NET to all of us.

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.

This book paid for itself in the first 15 minutes of reading. I use Crystal Reports 9 with Visual Studio .Net, and had struggled with several issues while creating reports that I couldn't find answers for in the Crystal documentation. This book answered nearly every question that I had in a clear and simple way, and I have found it to be an invaluable resource when doing report programming in the Visual Studio .Net IDE.My only gripes with this book are that there is no online version of the book included, and as a self published book, there are a large number of grammatical errors which detract a little from the reading experience. Other than that, this is a fantastic reference for anyone trying to learn Crystal Reports in a Visual Studio .Net environment.

I required this for a project I was working on. It gave me the information I was having a hard time finding in other places. Got the job done, so I can't complain!

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.

Excellent book. I like it because is very clear, has many examples. The author takes you step by step (one after the other) through the different aspects of Crystal Reports. As you read this book it is clear that the author took a great effort in writing about Crystal reports so that it is simple enough to understand each chapter (although some themas are quite complex).All the recommendations the author states are full of common sense (which ussually is the less common of the senses).

Nice guide to Crystal Reports with Visual Studio

Poorly written, very little, if any, useful information. Some pages are half-blank! The book has a very poor layout. And a lot of the pages are wasted by extra large screen shots. No good examples to follow. The features are explained but the examples are poor. Just opening the program and playing around with it, trying some examples I found on the web, was more useful than this book. I'm going to have to buy the Wrox book now. I had a peek at it in the book store and I liked it.