Professional Crystal Reports for Visual Studio .NET: Amazon.ca: David McAmis, Bill Sempf: Books

Product Description

Book Description

Virtually all applications need to present data to users, but any work beyond basic formatting - charts or conditional formatting, for example - can be very complex to program manually. Crystal Reports is one of the world's leading software packages for creating interactive reports, and it provides developers with an array of tools for creating rich reports that can be published on the Web or integrated within applications. Versions of Crystal Reports have been included with Visual Studio since 1993 but the latest version, Crystal Reports .NET, is now integrated more closely than ever before with Visual Studio .NET.

This book provides a detailed guide to the functionality provided with Crystal Reports .NET and shows you how to integrate reports into your .NET applications.

This book covers:

Crystal Reports .NET overview
Report integration for Windows and Web-based applications
Creating XML report web services
Working with .NET data, formulas, and logic
The reports engine
Distributing your application

From the Publisher

This book is aimed mainly at readers who have some experience with Crystal Reports and want a comprehensive guide to the functionality included with Crystal Reports .NET, but it will also be valuable to programmers who are getting their first taste of Crystal Reports through the Visual Studio .NET development environment.

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First Sentence
This book does not attempt to be all-inclusive, and it will not teach basic .NET techniques. Read the first page

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Customer Reviews

18 Reviews

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

Average Customer Review

3.8 out of 5 stars (18 customer reviews)

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3.0 out of 5 stars Am I missing something here?, Jun 27 2004

By

David W. Wood (Spring, TX United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)

This review is from: Professional Crystal Reports for Visual Studio .NET (Paperback)

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.

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5.0 out of 5 stars Hands Down The Best Crystal Reports.NET Book, April 12 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Professional Crystal Reports for Visual Studio .NET (Paperback)

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.

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2.0 out of 5 stars This is by no means a reference book!, Mar 16 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Professional Crystal Reports for Visual Studio .NET (Paperback)

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.

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