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Rating: 
Summary: CR for developers
Review: CrysDev starts out by explaining the layout of Crytal Reports designer and walks you through creating reports and connecting to data. The second half of the book gets into programming. This covers using the formula editor as well as integrating CR with VB6 via the RDC. Also, has coverage of programming reports to be viewed over the internet. The second half of the book has complete coverage of the all the different functions and properties that are used when working with the formula editor as well as the RDC. It also shows a lot of sample code that you can drop into your own applications.
Rating: 
Summary: a poor attempt
Review: Since Crystal Reports has become more and more popular, there are more and more books out there on the subject. I had bought Peck's Complete Reference and thought this would be a good addition to that title. I was dead wrong.The book tries to cover Crystal Reports 9, but they don't even use the most current version. And in the very first picture of a report in the book (when you are supposed to be looking at a Crystal Reports designer window) is wrong. It all just goes down hill from there. Throughout the book there are screen shots that have been blown up to cover the entire page (filler?) The first few examples are off of multiple dBase files and the report is an old Crystal Reports that used to ship with the samples. Through the first few chapters, the author switches between these dBase files, the Northwind database, an old version of the Crystal sample database and the new version of the Crystal sample data. On one of the pages he shows getting fields from the old database, on the facing page it is using the new database. It makes it impossible to follow what he is trying to accomplish. His writing style seems to be dumping every dialog out of Crystal Reports and copying what was in the help text. And then when get to the coding section to find he is using Crystals "Report Designer Component" and has basically dumped the developer help text out to make the rest of the book. It is a wonder Crystal doesn't sue him for it. When trying to troubleshoot what little real code there is to be found in the book, I found out that Crystal doesn't actually recommend using the RDC for development anymore! I should have known when I looked at the book on the shelf as the cover itself looked like an amateur attempt. That pretty much sums up the content as well.
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