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Product: Book - Paperback
Title: Professional Crystal Reports for Visual Studio .NET (Programmer to Programmer) Publisher: Wrox Authors: David McAmis Rating: 3/5  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.
Product: Book - Paperback
Title: Programming Perl (3rd Edition) Publisher: O'Reilly Authors: Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen, Jon Orwant Rating: 1/5  I bought a book, and was very unsatisfied for the following reasons: 1. It's not good for someone who wants to learn Perl. I'm fairly competent in C++, Java and VB and have more than four years of programming experience, still I could not learn what perl is about from this book. The authors seems to jump from one 'fact' to another, rather than presenting a well formed flow of teaching. The small but crutial facts (such as variable $_) are not explained in detail; may be because the authors are experts, they thought that anybody knew them by default. But that seems to be a mistake because those fatcs are not common in other languages and are new to even experienced C++ or Java programmers. 2. The author seems to prefer explaining why he designed perl in such a way to teaching how perl works. There are a lot of justifications in each section why perl is better. So, if you are a curious Perl fan, this book may be the one for you. If you are new to language and want to learn, the book will only discourage you. 3. Examples are very poorly chosen. Rather than introducing the bare minimum to understand a new concept, they provide a lot of unrelated new (probably advanced) concepts that distracts the reader. And the author goes on explaining those unrelated things on-the-spot, keeping the original topic aside; This is probably due to authors preference to real-world examples, and his dislike to write simple example programs even for a book .... 4. Almost every section has annoying forward references. Summary: If you are a computer linguist, you already know Perl and are interested in the internals of language design, this book would probably interest you. But if you want to learn, go somewhere else. I think this book would have better be named "Perl: Technical Reference". But even for such a book, it's too inconvenient having to dig the long paragraphs just to find a minute detail. Why couldn't he use techniques other authors use to make their books easy-to-read - rather than adding a lot of not-so-funny jokes as footnotes?
Product: Book - Paperback
Title: Designing with Web Standards Publisher: New Riders Press Authors: Jeffrey Zeldman Rating: 5/5  Before I read this book, I had no clue about CSS or web standards. I was almost to the point to think that CSS and web standards were a joke and useless. After reading Jeffrey's book, I became inspired to learn XHTML and CSS. I have successfully converted my personal web site from HTML to XHTML 1.1 which validates. It only took me two months to learn this and I owe Jeffrey a lot of thanks (plus Elizabeth Castro, Joe Clark and Eric Meyers). This book is money well spent.
Product: Book - Paperback
Title: Web Database Applications with PHP & MySQL, 2nd Edition Publisher: O'Reilly Authors: Hugh E. Williams Rating: 2/5  My background - a little bit of perl, BASIC language, html. This book in the first 2 or 3 chapters walks you through as to 'what is PHP?', after that it becomes confusing, like what one reviewer have posted, the book becomes more of theoritical in its approach. I would highly recommend 'PHP and MySQL Web Development' for those who are looking for that 'step by step' approach. Nothing like PHP for Dummies but just an indepth guide to proper PHP scripting. The authors of 'Web Database Application' may be experts in PHP scripting but should need to develop their teaching ability. Needless to say, this book is gathering dust.
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