The Complete Reference: Crystal 7 Reports [With *]

I bought this book a month after buying Crystal Reports (early 1999). I have used it constantly ever since and it has been my primary resource when I use the software on various consulting jobs. The book starts from the beginning and through a series of well defined chapters takes the reader up to an intermediate/expert stage. I taught myself the ActiveX (Visual Basic) module using the book as my primary reference. If you want a real "Bible" on the subject then it must be in your toolkit.

I work with Visual Basic 6 and Crystal Reports for a Fortune 50 company library IT group. The author has answered all the questions I have had with Crystal Reports, Seagate Analysis, and the RDC for VB app integration. His examples are "real-life." I strongly recommend.

There are few technical books on the market that really provide useful information to a developer. This book is one of the few that are complete, organized, and very useful. It covers topics from the introductory level through the advanced level making it a great productivity partner. Clearly and consisely written, it paid for itself in the first hour of use. If you work with Crystal 7, get this for your library.

This is the most complete and detailed document available. Anyone using Crystal Reports should own this. The author's experience with multiple versions of the product and real world customer implementation requirements prove invaluable. Crystal Reports is very feature rich product - the author makes logical sense of everything while still diving deep into the details.

I am an internal auditor and consultant for a large hospital system, and we are undergoing conversions which require working knowledge of Crystal -- like NOW! I have knowledge of SQL from Access and other DSS software, but am certainly no programmer. This book (COMPENDIUM) is perfect! The programmers hired to build the database containing our historical data and set up the connections to Crystal, told us that "they believed that Oracle didn't support inner joins" as an explanation of why triple table joins were not working. Intuitively I knew this was wrong, so I read up on Oracle, and dug into Mr. Peck's book. After digging around in the Crystal options and settings, I read the section in Mr. Peck's book about ODBC drivers. Then I went online with Seagate e-mail support, and sure enough, they sent just the information we needed. Our programmers used an outdated driver that had documented problems with joins. It was Mr. Peck's book that allowed me to (as a layperson) understand the underlying logic and pinpoint the problem. It also explained the logic clearly enough for me to communicate that information to our IS people in terms they could understand. Since they weren't knowledgeable about Crystal themselves, we all benefited hightly. I am recommending that the hospital purchase several copies of Mr. Peck's book for the IS people, and certain power users in Finance. Just this one instance has saved us time and (therefore) money in coming up to speed with data analysis. And considering the size and quality of the book, it's a hot deal anyway. BOTH THUMBS UP!!