Professional Crystal Reports for Visual Studio NET Description:

Professional Crystal Reports for Visual Studio NET review:
2 stars (Skip steps in examples, difficult to follow) - The examples in book are difficult to follow. Many intermediate steps were skipped. I am frustrated, trying to follow examples in the book and do not get the results shown on screenshots. I end up searching Google for answers, which I found all of them. If you plan to pay for this book, my recommendation is getting a copy of table of contents and then searching in Google for the contents. The book should mention (or at least refer to) the setup that makes Crystal Reports .NET work, e.g. where & how to set up IIS, virtual directory, etc. E.g., I can't get the screenshot shown in Figure 5-4 because I do not have the required virtual directory setup. Or, I can't get the screenshot in Figure 10-4 (still looking for answer as of writing).
1 stars (Look for another book) - I found quite a few mistakes. Does anyone review these books? The "chapter " on Web Services was particularly poor. I suggest looking for any other book on Crystal and .Net.
3 stars (Am I missing something here?) - I read the 2nd Edition. Many other reviewers thought the book was really good. Hm...it has some interesting ideas for additional, future work I would like to do, but ... 1. I found it to be rather disorganized. He jumps around a lot in the book, and sometimes it is hard to follow his examples. He tries to do two things at the same time: explain the different options in Crystal Reports and go through a detailed example (which doesn't cover all of the options). 2. I got off to a bad start in the book right away because he gives the .NET project the same name as the report, which confuses my version of Visual Studio .NET (2003 EA). In the sample code that can be downloaded from Wrox's web site, he uses a different name for the .NET project. 3. His explanation of cross tab reports is a joke (and has some mistakes in it). Fortunately, he uses a good example(s) for the cross tab report(s) and a reasonably intelligent person can figure it out. 4. He doesn't cover some of the "fun" stuff in report design like sizing and aligning report objects. He doesn't give you good tips for rapidly developing reports (other than using the report experts). He has written another book for beginners which I haven't read. Perhaps he covers some of these things there. 5. He could use more examples and more detail on subreports in his book. The reviewer from Singapore, for example, might benefit from that. 6. He does a very good job of reviewing the capabilities of Crystal Reports .NET versus the full retail versions of Crystal Reports like versions 9 and 10. 7. He does a good job of showing how to use Crystal Reports within the Visual Studio .NET IDE (which a lot of reviewers liked). However, he mentions the context menu for the report designer several times but never gives a screen shot of the menu in the book. One of the first things I did was to make a screen shot of that menu by doing a right click on the report I was designing. 8. Folks, if this is the best we can do, I plan to write my own book(s), beginner and advanced.