Crystal Reports XI for Developers

KEY FEATURES: * Teaches Crystal Reports from a developer’s perspective, from creating the first report and adding advanced formatting features to analyzing the report data and the code behind the report and expressions * Provides clear and easy-to-understand instruction, leveraging developers experience and knowledge with other desktop applications * developers need, including subreports, cross-tabs, charts, geographic maps, drawing objects * Discusses the various methods and issues with deployment and integration on various platforms such as Visual Studio .NET, ASP.NET, Java, and JSP * Includes a companion CD-ROM with all of the source code, sample reports, and figures from the book

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All Customer Reviews
Average Customer Review:
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

Horrible Book, 2007-07-17
Return this book if you've bought it. I bought a copy of this book without reading deeply into(my mistake) cause it looked like it would be useful. I am a C# developer and need to generate some Crystal reports for the project. When I got the book and started reading/looking up info, I found something startling. All of the Code Examples in the Book are VB. Now this doesn't sound bad if your a VB person, but it included C# Examples that were actually VB Code. This was amazing, I'd never seen a mess up by an editor like this. I returned this when i saw it and got a different book that actually had C# in it. Worst Book ever....


0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

Crystal Reports XI for Developers, 2007-07-03
This book has been very helpful in getting my reporting skills where they need to be. It has been much more helpful than the Crystal Reports user guide.


23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

Weak on Development Details, 2006-06-14
This book is not titled particularly well. It does present a good amount of detail about how to develop a report within Crystal Reports--but it does not do a very good job of telling you how to embed those reports into other applications, or how to call the reports from other applications. In other words, if it was titled something like 'Crystal Reports Reference' it would be a pretty good book--but it's definitely not going to serve up the kind of hard-hitting developmental details you would expect for a "developer's guide".

If you're looking for a very plain-vanilla introduction to Crystal Reports integration, this is perhaps sufficient. But if you're looking for the nuts-and-bolts of how to actually fully integrate Crystal Reports into your application--this book will dissappoint. I might note, however, that some of the new features of XI are covered in surprisingly good detail.

As a previous reviewer has noted, many of the implementation examples do not work or work only with considerable tweaking, and the number of development environments that is supported in the examples is somewhat limited.


1 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

Excellent resource , 2006-04-20
Crystal Reports is one of the most ubiquitous software packages for turning raw data into useful information. Whether it is a stand alone package or the reporting portion of another program it seems everyone is either using canned reports or writing custom ones with Crystal Reports at some point. In this book the author takes the reader through the process of creating the various types of reports available with Crystal Reports. Starting with the most basic reports that simply list the results he quickly moves the reader through sorting, totaling, grouping, and multiple other ways of organizing your data. From there he moves the reader through the creation of much more complex reports including consolidated ones with multiple sub-reports. In this book you will find everything you need to learn how to use Crystal Reports to its fullest potential including how to integrate it into your own programs. I wish I had had this book available to me when I was first learning Crystal Reports. Crystal Reports XI for Developers is highly recommended. I had no problem integrating a reporting module into a VB program that pulled data from a dbase database.


29 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

Don't buy this book - It is a waste of money, 2006-03-17
This book is supposed to be for developers. It's supposed to help you learn how to integrate Crystal XI with your application. DO NOT USE THIS BOOK! It is totally wrong when it comes to telling you how to do it.
Example (pg. 276-277) Explains how to view a report using just a line or two of code. Here's the code: CrystalReportViewer1.ReportSource = "D:\projects\dynselect.rpt"
It says to add this line in the Form_Load subroutine. Even after making sure the path was correct (mine was C:\Test\dynselect.rpt) it DOES NOT WORK! It comes up with an Invalid Cast Exception. You cannot simply pass the ReportSource property a string. It expects something else. I'm not sure what it expects (it looks like it needs a report object passed to it), but the book certainly doesn't have any clue.
This is totally inexcusable and renders the book useless for anyone wanting to integrate reports into their application.

It ignores Visual Basic 6 (which may be OK for some folks, but certainly made me upset - I still use VB6). There is supposed to be a web site that gives more help and resources from the book, but that is a joke as well. It has a single page that says that it will be ready by December 2005. It's way past that now and still nothing there (http://www.crystalxibook.com)

I can not imagine how this book got published when it is just plain wrong. I gave it 1 star only because the information about using Crystal XI is OK as long as you don't plan on using it in your application. Since this book is supposedly for Developers, even 1 star may be too many.

If you want to use Crystal XI to just create reports, not actually use them, then this book may help.
Otherwise, I would skip it and look for something else.

I will be returning this book.

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