Rating: 
Summary: The reference book that I go to first
Review: As a Crystal Info Administrator, I need to stay one step ahead of my hundreds of internal customers. When I have a problem or question about Crystal Reports, I look at George Peck's book first.
Not only does it provide the answer, it explains the solution.
Without "The Complete Reference", I would have to rely on Crystal Decisions documentation which can't compare to this great manual.
In fact, I recommend this book to my users at all levels.
Rating:
Summary: An Excellent Reference Guide
Review: As a Crystal Reports trainer I found the book to be a great guide. It is packed with examples and provides good detail about the additions to the new version and also how to overcome many of the quirks of Crystal Reports. It is a very good reference book for current Crystal Reports users, who will find in depth coverage of Crystal Reports, Seagate Analysis and the Report Designer component. Explanations are clear and concise. If you are a regular user of Version 8 this book will help you enormously.
Rating: 
Summary: A good beginners book.
Review: Crystal is easy from the get go, and can fool some non-technical people because they just plop some fields in the details section then summarize them and go "Wow, this thing's awesome!" But, they end up missing out on some of the more powerful things crystal can do, like running totals, variables and subreports as well as open themselves up for errors and mis-calculations. This book will give you a high-level overview of all of that plus just some nuts and bolts of the tool. Your best bet for any answers to VB, or C++ automation questions are.. the technical reference's that come with the CD, not this book. This is definitley the best beginners book out there and well worth the $35 if you need to develop some reports pretty quickly.
Rating:
Summary: Best Crystal Reports Reference on the Market
Review: I am a Crystal Reports Developer and I believe that "The Complete Reference" is the best book published for Crystal Reports. The documentation Seagate provides with the software does not compare to Peck's book. Seagate is notorious for inadequate and poorly written documentation; Peck's reference makes Crystal Reports usable. I would not recommend using any other book as a Crystal Reports reference.
Rating: 
Summary: Weight seems more important than content
Review: I find this book difficult to use as a reference. I code in VB and use the RDC and automation server elements a great deal. When looking for solutions to my problems I have found the explanations verbose and frequently lacking the content I need. Finding things in the index is also difficult (e.g. anything to do with asynchronous processing).
Rating:
Summary: Briefly: Indispensable
Review: I had a major hangup on a Crystal Reports 8 project at work which had baffled me and several others for days... Although Seagate's own .pdf documentation was consulted, it proved very difficult to track down the information we needed.Fifteen minutes' reading at a local book seller - after finding this newly released version of Peck's book - provided the solution we were looking for. Needless to say, they sold a copy.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Book
Review: I have been developing Visual Basic applications which incorporate Crystal Reports for about a year now. I had tremendous difficulty learning how to integrate reports into visual basic with user defined input. In a fit of desperation I bought this book and i must say that I have never been more pleasantly surprised by a refrence book. Mr. peck explained in detail the solution to my problem in 2 pages. I am now working on a new project which uses CR extensively and have had no problems that are not discussed in this book. If you are a Crystal Reports user follow these simple steps. 1) Throw out the Crystal Reports documentation that comes with the program. 2)Buy this book!
Rating: 
Summary: Somewhat useless
Review: I purchased this book for a specific job I needed to do. I have about a year of experience with CR 8, but I use it only in special circumstances. This book helped me learn what I needed to know about subreports. I skimmed some of the other chapters, and they looked pretty good. Particularly chapters geared towards SQL (14, 15, & 18). Overall, it's a good, solid book to help beginner to intermediate users gain a better understanding of CR 8.
Rating:
Summary: Solid book to gain a better understanding of CR
Review: I purchased this book for a specific job I needed to do. I have about a year of experience with CR 8, but I use it only in special circumstances. This book helped me learn what I needed to know about subreports. I skimmed some of the other chapters, and they looked pretty good. Particularly chapters geared towards SQL (14, 15, & 18). Overall, it's a good, solid book to help beginner to intermediate users gain a better understanding of CR 8.
Rating:
Summary: Clear, concise, simply the best
Review: I really liked this book because it is not only clear and concise, but it also covers all the things that you need to know to sucessfully create efficient reports. Moreover, I know that crystal report is the de facto standard for report generation in the industry. I started from knowing nothing about crystal report to become an expert report designer just by using this book. It covers not only the basics, but also the advanced features such as putting reports on the web without having the client install crystal report on their computer. It also teaches you how to create dynamic, real-time reports.
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