Yes, I have a copy of that book. In fact, when I saw the press release I was
all upset thinking that Wrox would be the death of my book. Luckily, once I
got a copy I saw that it read more like a brochure than a book. David McAmis
is a great writer and his book is very easy to read and understand. However,
it just touches on all the topics and nothing is covered in any depth. It
will get you through your first week or two of writing reports, but you
quickly have to start looking elsehwhere for answers to your questions. Have
you seen George Peck's CR 9 book? They put ".NET" all over the cover and
after you buy the book you find out that all he did was throw a bunch of
screen shots in the Appendix and it says, "See MSDN for more information".
Unbelievable marketing hype! Theres no telling how many .NET programmers
have thrown away their hard-earned money on this book to find out that it is
trash. And his book "Professional Crystal Reports" is a reprint of the help
files (literally). It makes me sick that they get away with this. I can't
wait for my book to come out and then people will see what a CR programming
book is supposed to look like. My book focuses on giving you answers and not
screen shots.
Personally, I wish my writing style was as good as David's is. He is great
at introducing a topic and showing how to use it. My writing style is more
of what a "computer geek" would write. I just spit out what I want to say
and show the code for it. For example, he introduces Report Web Services
with almost 3 pages explaining what it is and why its beneficial. My chapter
on web services has two paragraphs telling you that you can deliver reports
using HTTP and then the rest of the chapter shows you how to create and
program them. His style appeals to a newbie learning reports for the first
time. My style is for hard-core programmers who have deadlines to meet and
just want to see code. However, in the first part of my book I use a
tutorial style of writing so that new programmers can learn how to create
reports. But if you are reading the chapter on web services, I figure that
you most likely an intermediate programmer so why should I restate the
obvious? It just wastes pages and costs me money. Since I'm paying for the
book out of my own pocket I have to make sure each page is useful or else I
will remove it.
Wow, what a long response that was.
Brian Bischof
A Crystal Reports.NET book for programmers? Its here!
* Covers ASP.NET and Windows Forms
* Teaches all phases of report development
* Alerts you to the bugs and how to get around them
* Maps out the complex ReportDocument object model
* Shows how to perform runtime customization
* Demonstrates all options of connecting with ADO.NET
* Gives complete code listings for every concept presented
http://www.crystalreportsbook.com/123aspx.asp
"SStewart" <nf*@nospam.com> wrote in message
news:OA**************@TK2MSFTNGP11.phx.gbl...
The only book I have is Professional Crystal Reports for Visual Studio
..NET, which doesn't seem to have enough depth. (have you seen it?)
This is very encouraging and BADLY needed.
"Brian Bischof" <br***@nospam.bischofsystems.com> wrote in message
news:eo*************@TK2MSFTNGP11.phx.gbl...
All the above - from beginners to advanced developers. It's a 2 part
book. Part 1 is for newbies to CR who just want to learn how to create reports and do things like grouping/subreports/etc. Part 1 also teaches how to do
formulas and is a reference for Basic syntax. Part 2 is for people who
want to do advanced .NET runtime customization of reports. Each chapter is
filled with tons of code samples (VB.NET and C#) that have been written so that
you can drop them directly into your own projects. It also covers
programming Web Services, RDC, and RAS. Most of this code is undocumented except in
my book (I know b/c I spent countless hours researching how to do every
imaginable task with CR and I put all the code in here). In my biased
opinion, its one of a kind (and desperately needed by the .NET
community).
Brian Bischof
A Crystal Reports.NET book for programmers? Its here!
* Covers ASP.NET and Windows Forms
* Teaches all phases of report development
* Alerts you to the bugs and how to get around them
* Maps out the complex ReportDocument object model
* Shows how to perform runtime customization
* Demonstrates all options of connecting with ADO.NET
* Gives complete code listings for every concept presented
http://www.crystalreportsbook.com/123aspx.asp
"BStorm" <nf*@nospam.com> wrote in message
news:u6***************@tk2msftngp13.phx.gbl... That is great news. What level will your book be targeted? (Beginner,
Intermediate, Advanced, Professional?)
"Brian Bischof" <br***@nospam.bischofsystems.com> wrote in message
news:%2****************@TK2MSFTNGP12.phx.gbl...
> CR.NET has extensive language support. You can program formulas
using Basic
> syntax or Crystal syntax (similar to C). However, if you are using
Datasets
> to populate the report, you are better off doing the parsing at the .NET > level prior to passing it to CR. Just add two new fields to your
datatable > and save the parsed results there. But if that doesn't suit you,
just use > the CR built in syntax and you'll be good to go.
>
> I have an entire book about CR.NET coming out on Amazon on April 1st and I'm
> offering autographed copies on my website prior to its release. I
also have
> a free ebook you can download off my website which teaches the
basics of > integrating Crystal Reports with .NET.
>
>
> HTH,
> Brian Bischof
>
> A Crystal Reports.NET book for programmers? Its here!
> * Covers ASP.NET and Windows Forms
> * Teaches all phases of report development
> * Alerts you to the bugs and how to get around them
> * Maps out the complex ReportDocument object model
> * Shows how to perform runtime customization
> * Demonstrates all options of connecting with ADO.NET
> * Gives complete code listings for every concept presented
>
> http://www.123aspx.com/redir.aspx?res=30160
>
>
>
>
> "BStorm" <nf*@nospam.com> wrote in message
> news:%2****************@TK2MSFTNGP12.phx.gbl...
> > I have a transaction log file where the DataSet table's
Description column
> > is actually delimited into "subcolumns" based upon the transaction
id. I > > would like to parse these into separate fields for reporting
purposes and
> am
> > wondering if anyone knows if this is easily accomplished using the
.NET > > version of Crystal Reports?
> >
> > For example, the description column may be reporting on a
dataentry error
> as
> > follows:
> >
> > TXNCODE: 1010001
> > DESCRIPTION: "USERID: xxxxxxxxx TAXID: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx"
> >
> > I would like to, say, parse the substrng values for USERID and
TAXID from
> > the DESCRIPTION column.
> >
> >
> >
>
>
