Crystal Reports 6 for Dummies

Rating:
Summary: You can pick this book up and become an expert.
Review: I am a consultant. I went to a client sight never having seen this program before with this book. I had things up and running in a few days using this book.

Rating:
Summary: High expectations but incomplete delivery
Review: I am a professional trainer and I now travel the country training Crystal Reports. At the time that I was requested to teach the class the only resource that I could find was this book. It was insightful, and contained enormous amounts of very useful information. So much so that I was able to teach my first class on the topic within two weeks of picking up the book. For starters and novices, this book is invaluable.

Rating:
Summary: for Dummies, yes; for technical professionals, no
Review: This book would be an excellent guide for helping a non-computer professional produce rather basic and simple reports. However, the examples provided remain at the simple level and are useless in helping produce more complex reports. A section on more complex formulas would have been appreciated. Whatever true power there is in Crystal Reports remains unexplored by this book.

Rating:
Summary: High expectations but incomplete delivery
Review: When I first purchased this book is looked like just the ticket to learn Crystal Report Writing. The table of contents promised a full and rich coverage of the topic. The author provides a light hearted approach and takes the dryness out of the subject. However, the big difficulty is the author does not include the database with the book. He claims that the student SHOULD have access to CRAZE.MDB. Not everyone has access to this data. All the examples and exercises are dependent upon this database. It is a real struggle to work through the concepts using a totally different database. The author does not even provide a listing of the data so the student could create the database before wading through the topics. Be aware of this drawback before you venture through this book.