development

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.

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.

I have been writing web applications using "Classic" ASP and notepad since it was first introduced with the early versions of IIS and have recently started upgrading these applications to ASP.NET after many months of soul searching. Part of my reluctance to upgrade these applications was that most of them were for simply displaying data and statistics, which I painfully created my own layouts for (as there was little alternative)

So when I saw there was a copy of Crystal Reports included with .NET, I decided to give it a try to see if I could actually use reports instead of presenting the data in my own format and bought this book to help me along.

I can not tell you what a difference that this book as made-- I quickly zipped through the report design part and got straight on to the integration with web forms and found that I could create and integrate a report in a fraction of the time it took me before to do a manual table layout. The book is the right size and is down to the point.

If I had one criticism, it would be that the coverage of report design didn't cover graph formatting in depth, but it did get me enough to get started.