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Crystal Reports XI for Developers
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List Price:
$49.95
Homebizpc.com Price:
$32.97
Your Savings: $ 16.98 ( 34% )
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Manufacturer: Charles River Media
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Average Customer Rating:   
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 651.78028557585
EAN: 9781584504115
ISBN: 1584504110
Label: Charles River Media
Manufacturer: Charles River Media
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 464
Publication Date: 2005-11-21
Publisher: Charles River Media
Studio: Charles River Media
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Editorial Reviews:
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Crystal Reports XI is a powerful software tool for turning raw data into corporate decision-making information. End-users and developers alike use Crystal Reports to extract and format information, and with over 9 million licenses shipped, Crystal Reports is one of the most popular packages for corporate reporting. This book provides a solid introduction for any report or application developer just getting started. Using this practical guide, they will learn to create presentation-quality reports from a variety of data sources and how to add the advanced features developers need, such as subreports, cross-tabs, charts, geographic maps, and more. Developers will also learn to create simple to complex reports with the formatting and organization techniques presented in the book, and how to add filtering and summaries to crunch millions of rows of data into a concise and meaningful format. Crystal Reports XI for Developers is filled with step-by-step essentials and real-world examples that teach developers how to take full advantage of Crystal Report’s key features to create information-rich, quality reports from their own data. 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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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Horrible Book
Comment: 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....
Customer Rating:
Summary: Crystal Reports XI for Developers
Comment: 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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Weak on Development Details
Comment: 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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Excellent resource
Comment: 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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Don't buy this book - It is a waste of money
Comment: 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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