Brian Bischof
1 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.
2 Quick Customer Service
I've just purchased a copy of this book. On first inspection, the contents look promising. Howerver, the quality control is poor; pages 215 - 246 are missing.
Update:
The good news is that the author (and self publisher) is very responsive. I sent an email complaining of the missing pages and within a few hours received a response from the author. He's offered to provide a replacement. He's a good guy.
3 Top notch. Don't wring your hands, just buy this book.
I cannot believe anyone who has actually read this book has given it less than 5 stars. I am a veteran software engineer and application developer who has been using CR.NET from day one of its existance (and many other report writers long before it). Nonetheless, it is ridiculous how much I have learned from this book. Let's face it, the MSDN content on Crystal Reports for .NET is weak; I know, because I have read all of it. This book not only fills the gap, it cracks the walls on both sides.
This is the only book on the planet that covers CR for the Visual Studio developer this well. If you use Visual Studio, no matter which language, and you use Crystal Reports, you need this book. And don't use the excuse that it is too late in the cycle for the current version and you are waiting for VS 2005, and the 2005 version of this book. If you have to write any new reports with CR.NET between now and when 2005 ships, this book will a) save you a lot of time and b) make your reports better than before. The $25 this book costs is a joke for the value packed in these pages.
Final note: Brian has self-published a technical book that shames the major publishers of technical books available today. You can really tell that this was something he worked very hard on to get right and he succeeded in a big way. Encourage him to do this again; buy the book if you need this valuable info.
4 Solid Crystal Reports book
I am a practicing (read paid) developer and needed to quickly ramp up on Crystal Reports in Visual Studio 2003. My prior report writing was done in Access using VBA.
This book is extremely useful. It has good examples and is very well written. I would have spent a great deal more time learning without it.
5 One of the worst computer books I've read.
Poorly written, very little, if any, useful information. Some pages are half-blank! The book has a very poor layout. And a lot of the pages are wasted by extra large screen shots. No good examples to follow. The features are explained but the examples are poor. Just opening the program and playing around with it, trying some examples I found on the web, was more useful than this book. I'm going to have to buy the Wrox book now. I had a peek at it in the book store and I liked it.
6 Fantastic Crystal Reports Reference
This book paid for itself in the first 15 minutes of reading. I use Crystal Reports 9 with Visual Studio .Net, and had struggled with several issues while creating reports that I couldn't find answers for in the Crystal documentation. This book answered nearly every question that I had in a clear and simple way, and I have found it to be an invaluable resource when doing report programming in the Visual Studio .Net IDE.
My only gripes with this book are that there is no online version of the book included, and as a self published book, there are a large number of grammatical errors which detract a little from the reading experience. Other than that, this is a fantastic reference for anyone trying to learn Crystal Reports in a Visual Studio .Net environment.
7 Praise for Crystal Reports .NET Programming
Brian Bischof did a fantistic job on this book. I wasted days searching for the solution to passing the path of an access database to my distributed application using Crystal Reports. DAYS! And his straight forward clear explanations had me up and running just a few minutes after I cracked the book. For anyone intergrading CR into a .NET application, this book is a Must. Apress deserves a kick in the ... umm ... head, for pulling the contract on this book. Thank you Brian for persevering and publishing it anyway. I'd buy it for twice the price.
For those folks that are hung up on a few typos, get over it! The value of the information in this book (and available no where else I might add) far out weigh the minor grammatical errors.
8 Just Put Online Help in this book!
Please don't waste your money on this book! It just put MSDN and Crystal Report online help into this book! The examples are also very poor. The author doesn't understand Crystal Report.NET and Visual Studio.NET very well. He just copy some examples from online help or from website because I asked him some questions. Although the book already has the contents, he responsed he doesn't know! I understand why the publisher doesn't want to publish it!
9 Just what I was looking for
As a developer new to the .net world and Crystal Reports I was overwhelmed by the task of creating an application using both with just the help files.
Brian Bischof has done an excellent job of explaning and demonstrating solutions to this daunting task. This book is one of the best at getting to the meat of the matter I have read. After explaining the task to be tackled, there are excellent examples and sample code.
Thanks for writing this book, it has saved me from hours of frustration!
10 Perfect book to ramp up on Crystal for a .net developer
This is an outstanding book that provides any .net developer exactly what they need to know to take full advantage of the version of Crystal Reports that comes with VS.NET. This book allowed me to ramp up and take full advantage of Crystal in just three days and will serve as an excellent reference as long as I use the product. I have read a lot of software books and I think this is the best written one that I have used. The only problem I've had with the book is that it isn't physically put together well; it's bound to tightly and poorly and pages are already falling out. It's good enough, however, that I'll buy another copy if this one totally falls apart.
11 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.
12 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.
13 worst book i have bought
An overrated title that doesn't deserve the praise is has been given. Incomplete, error-filled and poor coverage of report design. I reccomend Peck's "Crystal Reports 10: The Complete Reference"
14 Sweet book!
The book is a Crystal Report - .Net centric book. I don't need to know how to create a report using the crystal interface, I need it to tell me how to create it using he Visual Studio IDE. This book teaches does just that. The best part about a book for me is the author himself. Like other notable technical authors (e.g. Cricket Liu), Brian trolls the newsgroups and on many occassions offers up free advice. Thank you Brian for the book and I hope you stay in the NG's.
15 Finally! A book that explains .NET and Crystal Reports
Brian Bischof's book finally explains how to use Crystal Reports with .NET from both the design and code perspectives. In fact, this book is required reading for anyone wanting to learn how to setup report content in code (using dataviews, etc.) and transfering that information via datasets and XML to Crystal Reports. And, this includes BLOB fields.
Before Bischof's book it seemed that these techniques were some sort of closely guarded secret. Other books on Crystal Reports and .NET focus mainly on direct database connections rather than making use of datasets, which are at the core of .NET. His explanation on programming Crystal Reports is essential information I've not found anywhere else. Thanks and great job!!!
16 Crystal Reports .NET Programming by Brian Bischof
Written by a programmer for programmers! I recently added this gem to my library of invaluable programming bibles. Beginner and advanced Crystal Report developers alike will find this book a good read. I must admit that I just browse through most development-type bibles. I started reading...and I mean reading this excellent resource. I couldn't put it down. I couldn't skip over sections in fear of missing valuable best practises suggestions. .NET delivery or not, I urge you to get this valuable resource.
17 The best resource for Crystal Reports .NET
Though I 'm not new to .NET, but I am new to Crystal Reports .NET. The main reason behind it is that I was unable to find a good resource for Crystal Reports .NET until now. I do fully agree with the author's statement that someone should have written this type of book years ago.
I did not seem to pay much attention to the typos or grammatical errors in the book as for me the most interesting were the concepts that were being delivered and I was easily able to understand them.
Crystal Reports .NET Programming is the most comprehensive resource available on the topic right now. I have found it to be a good resource and do recommend it to those who are interested in learning Crystal Reports.NET.
18 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.
19 a waste of time and money
I found the book oriented to developers who already have reports to work with. I was disappointed in the lack of material presented for creating my own reports and subsequent applications.
20 An EXCELLENT Resource!
I am new to Crystal Reports.NET and have pretty much found this to be the most comprehensive book on the subject out there!
There seems to be many differences in regular Crystal Reports and Crystal Reports.NET and Brian's book, being specific to CR.NET, was just the piece to the puzzle I was looking for. Just scanning 2 pages in initially opening the book solved 2 issues that I could not find anywhere else on the Internet searching Google!
Our manager has attempted to find a training resource locally who could teach a class on CR.NET and has come up empty. There seem to be plenty of CR classes, but none specific to CR.NET.
Obviously whoever said the market was flooded with this information should be looking for another job.
Bravo to Brian for offering his knowledge to the public. As I have been branded one of the CR.NET resources at work, I am sure this book will rarely leave the top of my desk.
I hope he will decide to releases updated editions and pass along his future learnings of CR.NET to all of us.
21 A fair appraisal
After reading through the edition of this book that was online, I decided to take a punt and buy the print version (after the he took down the online version, just when I needed it!!!!) After reading and trying to work through the material, I have a few thoughts and honest criticism about the book:
* Some of the same problems that plagued the online version of the book still pop up in the print edition, mainly mis-spelled words, typos and inconsistencies in the text, as well as grammatical errors that make the book difficult to read.
* Terminology, examples and screen shots used in the book do not match what you see in the help files and documentation that ships with the product. In just a few minor examples, the author uses wrong terms for objects within the report designer, making it hard to cross-reference or lookup something in the help, the path given throughout the book for the sample database is wrong (I had to find it myself) and the screen shots show a report designer that looks different to the one in Visual Studio.
* And I know it is a little thing, but the font used for code is Arial and the text itself is Times New Roman, so it is hard to tell what is code and what is not and the examples are obscure-- I was looking for something I could implement in my own application, not just a simple example I could have gotten from the vendor's web site.
I understand from the author's web-site that this is a self-published title and he has made the best of a bad situation when this book was cancelled by a proper publisher. However, I think there were more factors than just an economic downturn in the cancellation of this book.
In order for it to be worth the money, this title would need to have some serious work done on the structure and content as well as editing and proofreading, which a publisher would have provided.
I know it has been said before, but you can't go past Peck's "Crystal Reports: A Complete Reference" in terms of reference material and accuracy. It may not have the depth of coverage for .NET (especially for C#) but it is the most comprehensive reference available. If this title could overcome some of the issues I highlighted above and broaden it's coverage it could be a contender, but not yet.
22 The only Crystal Reports book you'll need!
I downloaded the online version and found it very useful. When this version came out I immediately bought it
a) because I knew it would be of use (and it certainly is)
and
b) because Brian appears to have put a huge amount of time and effort into it, and if nobody buys it, he wont do it again!!
All in all a well written and friendly book to be reccommended.
23 Finally! A thorough Crystal programming reference
Not having done any Crystal Reports programming before, I found this book to be excellent! The examples were exactly what I needed and had several projects finished in no time. It's nice having both VB and C# examples in one place.
I also found the functions chapter to be helpful - the first reference I've ever seen to cover that many functions.
I would highly recommend this book - well worth the money.
24 Best CR book hands down...
First of all thank you Mr. Bischof for this book! This book provided for me answers to questions that I would spend hours researching and could not find in other books. Screen shots and two sets of code examples what more could I ask for? All in all this book has saved my job and I learned a few things that are not covered in other books at all.
It seems the other publishing companies have got there people submitting negative comments. If you are unsure send Mr. Bischof an email. He has responded to all of my questions.
25 World class and a life saver
Brian Bischof is an excellent writer, and this is a great book.
If you are .NET programmer who wants to create Crystal Reports to go with your applciations, this is a must-have book.
Well written, thorough, comprehensive, well-illustrated and highly recommended.
26 The Best Crystal Report Reference
I was very impressed with how well written this book is. The information is presented in such a way that even beginners can quickly learn how to create useful reports, but is complete enough that seasoned developers will find a great deal of value here. I definitely think that this book would benefit not only .NET programmers, but also anyone using any version of Crystal Reports. Even though I am familiar with much of the information in this book, I found a number of helpful tips.
I was amazed at how informative this book is considering its size. I also have the George Peck books for both CR7 and CR9. Peck's book has been a recommended resource for CR developers. Mr. Bischof's book presents all of the topics in a much more concise manner. This is one of the few books I've found specifically geared towards CR.NET programmers. I like the screen shots, the tips (and cautions) and the footnotes. I especially like that Mr. Bischof took the time to list out properties and methods, etc., along with their descriptions. I've seen too many books that direct you to the spot where you can set a property and then leave you to search out information about the properties and what the parameters are. I also think that a good many programmers will be happy that he included both the VB and the C# code. I like that they are in separate areas. I've seen books that explain that the particular language used is unimportant to the concept being presented. Then, in order to show no partiality to a language mix the languages in their samples, jumping from one language in one sample, to another language in the next.
I would highly recommend this book to anyone who uses Crystal Reports or would like to learn more about it in order to add this tool to their repertoire. Crystal Reports seems to be the world standard for reporting tools and this is the book I will be using as my primary reference from now on.
27 Best CR.NET book around
I would like to thank Brian Bischof for taking the trouble to have this book published. I understand that he had problems in the past with this book, and I registered for it while he was still working on it from his website.
This is simply the best source for using Crystal Reports.NET that is out there. It has answered every question I have had (and even a few I was not aware that I had).
Thank you Brian!
28 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.
29 Incredible resource!
Brian Bischof first posted the contents of this book to his web site after the publisher backed out, claiming that the market was saturated. (Note: that is my interpretation. I'm not a party to the deal so I could be wrong.) In either case, I disagree. While the market on .NET books is quite competitive the market on well written .NET books centering around Crystal Reports is most certainly not!
This book covers everything you'll need to know about Crystal Reports and using them inside the .NET Framework in all capacities. It is divided into two parts. The first is a general introduction to Crystal Reports .NET and reporting in general; the second is advanced details about the underlying object model, integration with future flavors of Crystal Reports, and more.
The book abounds with screen shots, but each screen shot is clearly explained. This is not a "screen shot to increase page count" book; this is a "screen shot to help clarify" book. I personally enjoy a large number of screen shots because it helps me transfer information to newer versions or releases of products. If an author explains a dialog poorly the screen shot allows me to see clearly where it is, what it has, and other items of interest that may help me locate its equivalent.
Other nice features are a complete chapter on dynamic data sources, coverage of parameters, coverage of stored procedures, extensive code examples, and a good deal of useful information regarding working with Crystal Reports functions. Part of the reason I think this book is so informative is that it was reviewed by the Crystal Report .NET community at large and from what I gather a large amount of feedback was generated that was taken into account.
The only book I've found that comes close to this one in terms of usefulness in regards to Crystal Reports .NET is Wrox's Professional Crystal Reports for Visual Studio .NET. Wrox's book did not have the depth that Crystal Report .NET Programming does; however, anyone considering this book as an addition to the Wrox book should note that it moves forward on the same basic premise. There is no coverage of importing existing reports or infrastructures into Crystal Report .NET. A good majority of the book is aimed at creating new. (Porting between CR9 Enterprise and CR.NET for me has been mostly a loss of superfluous formatting; the data has remained intact. I have not used Crystal Reports 8, and my Crystal Reports 7 experience was a long time ago at a former employer.)
I have not found any other books exclusively centered on working with Crystal Reports inside the Visual Studio environment. Other books will include a chapter on this integration but focus mainly on the Professional, Developer, or Enterprise versions of Crystal Reports.
Reporting is a fact of life. Our suits aren't going to let us put together new toys unless those toys spit data back out at them. This book will show you how to do that and much, much more.
Why such an effusive review? This book has saved my bacon many times in web form. The dynamic data source issue crops up at my current place of employment continuously - people always want to move data around, here to there. The entries here were instrumental to me actually understanding how CR worked with data sources, and how I could manage it.
(...)
Miscellaneous notes: The font is nice, large and clear. Some of the screen shots get a little fuzzy but never unreadable. The charts included (for the object model) are especially helpful when you're feeling your way around. The book is extremely nice and feels right in my hand. The binding is probably my biggest complaint because it resists the "prop open with two other books" method I use.
The web form of the book I refer to is no longer available to my knowledge; it was up for review and critique while Brian Bischof finished writing the book in question.
