| " In
any bureaucracy, paper work increases as you spend more and more
time reporting
on the less and less you are doing ." -- Anonymous
I've known Brian Bischof for several years now, and even
though we've never met personally, we correspond regularly. Over this
period I have come to respect Brian both for his abilities and for his
advice. That's why I was excited to see Brian carry through so masterfully
on an almost abandoned project to write a book about Crystal Reports,
that anathema which has accompanied Visual Studio for quite some time
now.
As Brian states on his web site, "This book was originally
being written for Apress. When the economy took a nose dive they cancelled
my contract. I got frustrated and put the entire book online for everyone
to read. The first two chapters were free and the remaining chapters
required a free registration. After getting 18,000 registrations during
the first year, I decided to finish the book. Yes, I'm self-publishing
the book instead of using a large publisher. After working many, many
months and spending a lot of money, I finished the book and got it printed.
The book is being sold on Amazon.com and at NerdBooks.com. The retail
price is $34.95. I hope that it benefits you and your colleagues." Brian not only completed his book project, he became an expert
at custom self-publishing to boot, and proved to me that anybody with a
real drive to succeed can take control of the entire publishing process
and pull off a real coup de grace.
Crystal Reports .NET Programming finally
provides .NET developers with a real, usable resource for harnessing that
strange Crystal Reports add-on that appears in the installation options
for Visual Studio.NET, and to use it effectively to deliver real enterprise-level
reporting solutions for their clients. This is the kind of material that
should have been included with Visual Studio.NET, but wasn't.
Brian's book is divided into two parts. Part I is geared
more toward beginners. The author takes you through installation, designing
reports, and all the bells and whistles involved in "getting comfy" with
Crystal Reports. After getting the basics and actually designing your first
report, you will move on to grouping and sorting data, calculating totals,
adding subreports, and connecting to data sources. Bischof presents critical
information on methods and properties in both table and narrative form
in such a manner as to make this not only a valuable learning tool, but
an excellent reference book as well - one that you will want to keep handy
on your desk as you work. The book's index is also well laid out and makes
it easy to find critical information easily.
Part II of Crystal Reports .NET Programming is
for advanced developers. It carefully lays out the undocuimented Report
Object Model so that you can "get under the hood" of how reports are actually
designed and created. Bischof shows us, among many other details (some
of which I am sure cannot be found at all, except in this book), how to
do runtime customization to integrate reports with ASP.NET pages, Winforms
apps and even Webservices. For those who are upgrading to the full product,
he show us how to use the RDC (Report Designer Component) and the RAS (Report
Application Server).
Brian got a lot of feedback during the creation of this book,
some from me and plenty of other people. He had selected chapters of the
book at his special site www.CrystalReportsBook.com and
you can still download a free Ebook there. The full paperback, 530 pages
of detailed, professional instruction on Crystal Reports for .NET from
A to Z, lists for $34.95 and is worth far more, in my opinion. Thanks to
Brian Bischof, developers should never again fear walking in the "Valley
of the dreaded Crystal Report for .NET". The book's original run sold
out so quickly, it's now in its second printing.
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