Crystal Reports .Net Programming

by Brian Bischof

I wrote this book from the perspective of a programmer wanting to learn how to integrate reports within a .NET application. I've been working with Crystal Reports since Visual Basic 3 and it's always... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0974953652
• ISBN13: 9780974953656
• Release Date: March 2004
• Publisher: Bischof Systems
• Length: 530 Pages
• Weight: 1.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.2" x 8.8"

Customer Reviews

This guy is NOT with the program

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.

If only someone at Crystal could write like this!!!

A GodSend!!After spending $2000 for Crystal 10 Enterprise-I was appalled by the lack of documentation, examples and tutorials. (I did find some examples on the Crystal Decisions website but had trouble translating them to my specific programming tasks.)Most Crystal Report Books spend a lot of time on the Report Designer which in my humble opinion, from a programmer's perspective, is superfluous.Brian excels in both explaining Crystal Reports and integrating it into .Net for programmers. Brian gives you the object model and examples of specific methods. These are readily useable from VB.Net to ASP.Net.By explaining the inner workings of Crystal; e.g., the two-step processing of report data, the reader can understand differences between items such as subtotals and running totals.Within about 2 hours after perusing his chapter on exporting and deploying, I was able to set up a report in an asp.net application (with a few adjustments).Consider me a fan. I look forward to other works from Brian. I will do all I can to make his self-publishing profitable.

Invaluable as tutorial and as a reference

Let's get this straight from the beginning--this is not a book about Crystal Reports 10, nor Crystal Reports 9. This is about Crystal Reports .NET, which is a different version altogether. The second part of this book does a great job of discussing the rich programming model of the CR.NET engine, and also indicates clearly the limitations of the CR.NET engine (CR.NET is far more limited than CR9 or CR10--that's why it's bundled with Visual Studio). The first part of this book is a very good resource for people who have not worked with Crystal Reports Design, or may be new to the Visual Studio interface. The numerous examples are given in both C# and VB.NET. This book was self-published and self-edited by the author, so you'll find an occasional typo. Save your money on the WROX Press book by David McAmis--that one is far more riddled with errors far less useful.

Excellent Crystal Reports .NET Book

I'm new to Crystal Reports .Net. To be more precise, I'm new to the whole .Net framework. Currently i'm using the book at my internship and it's helping my out ALOT. I've read several of the reviews for this book from grammatical errors to the author used the wrong font. First of all, the author wrote this book about Crystal Reports .NET, not Crystal Reports 9 or 10. There is a difference. Secondly, the author has a section within the first few pages of his book addressing the grammatical errors called "Grammatical Errors" (In Bold). After all, he did self-published the book and editing your own work is extremely hard. So those who were commenting about that are taking this review a little bit too seriously. Yeah, the terminology ("web page" should be "ASP. NET Web App") is probably wrong but as you read on you'll know exactly what he means. As far as examples, when you install Crystal Reports .Net it comes with example reports to work with. The author guides you on how to retrieve them in the first chapter of the book. He even gives you the full file extension (if you didn't change the default) of the report's location. Anyhow, Crystal Reports .NET programming is an excellent book/reference for first time users AND professionals even though I don't consider myself to be one. He goes into detail as to what each Taps, components, viewers, and other features do; and how and when to used them.The codes given in this book are well explained and easy to follow. Most codes access features that other books do not go into.It is a well written, extremely thorough and comprehensive yet not too technical for first-time users to understand book to have and its well worth the listed price. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn how to use Crystal Reports .Net.

Finally

First there isn't much information for crystal reports in .net out there. (There is an other book, but it didn't help me much)But now things are looking better. CR .NET Programming Covers about all aspects from making a report over runtime changes to deploying your applications w crystal reports. And it has extensive code examples. I'm working w CR in .NET for about a year now and exept for the first few chapters (starter stuff) i found things i didn't know (even big things) every few pages. Impressive.If you are struggeling w CR .NET or want to get more out of it you should have this.