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THE ORGIN OF LIFE ... Read more

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Chapters: George Pólya, Abraham Wald, Ivan Fellegi. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 18. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: Abraham Wald (October 31, 1902) - December 13, 1950) was a mathematician born in Cluj, in the then AustriaHungary (present-day Romania) who contributed to decision theory, geometry, and econometrics, and founded the field of statistical sequential analysis. He spent his researching years at Columbia University. Being a religious Jew, he could not attend school on Saturdays, as was required at the time by the Hungarian school system, and was thus home-schooled by his parents until college. His parents were quite knowledgeable and competent as teachers. In 1927, he entered graduate school at the University of Vienna, from which he graduated in 1931 with a Ph.D. in mathematics. His advisor there was Karl Menger. Despite Wald's brilliance, he could not obtain a university position, because of Austrian discrimination against Jews. However, Oskar Morgenstern created a position for Wald in economics. When the Nazis invaded Austria in 1938, the discrimination against Jews intensified. In particular, Wald and his family were persecuted as Jews. Wald was able to emigrate to the United States, at the invitation of the Cowles Commission for Research in Economics, to work on econometrics research. Wald and his wife died in an airplane crash in the Nilgiri mountains, in southern India, while on an extensive lecture tour at the invitation of the Indian government. Following his death, Wald was attacked by Sir Ronald A. Fisher FRS; Fisher attacked Wald for being a mathematician without scientific experience who had written an incompetent book on statistics, Fisher claimed; Fisher particularly criticized Wald's work on the design of experiments, alleging ignorance of the basic ...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=1239430 ... Read more

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The most definitive resource on Crystal Reports available! Create presentation-quality reports using the most powerful data analysis tool and this comprehensive guide. Crystal Reports 8.5: The Complete Reference explains in detail how to use the software to analyze and format data, generate reports, and perform advanced interactive reporting from the Web. Also, learn to develop custom applications and incorporate any Crystal Report into your Windows applications. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (16)

Nice reference for new to Crystal Reports
I recently started a new job that included a significant amount of Crystal Reports development. I found to my dismay that there is very little information on Crystal Reports development on the Internet.

Crystal Reports 8.5 is by far the least intuitive tool (or development platform, whatever you want to call it) that I have ever worked with.The manuals provided with Crystal reports appear to be written buy someone as lost as I, because they didn't offer any insight, or provide any information that I didn't already know.

This book provided a good foundation for me, and I feel like I can tackle a good portion of the problems that I'm now faced with for reporting. The book covers traditional reporting problems, and as it seems with everything I get involved in, the work I'm doing is not traditional, but it does provide good principals and has a lot of information that helps me to be able to move on to the non-traditional stuff much better.

Poor Index, Missing key concepts, Garbage...
I frequently use these reviews to select books of all types.I consider myself a power user able to learn rapidly from good texts.This book has not been very helpful for my work in Crystal Reports.

I need to be able to program Crystal Reports to perform a variety of complex reporting on databases that are completely denormalized.Thus, the ability to parse strings and execute stored procedures is critical.

This book completely fails to provide the information about built-in commands that I need.For instance, no information about string commands is present.No discussion of the use of arrays in Crystal Reports is provided.

I was deeply disappointed with this book.

Who are you writing this book for?
After reading positive reviews of this title, I decided to purchase the complete reference and was extremely disappointed. The most common problem with crystal books (or any other software application manual-excel, access, etc.) is that the author try's to appeal to all crystal report's users.There are generally three types of software user's out their, 1. database administrator/computer programmers who want reference manuals with excellent indexes. 2. Basic users who can get by with your classic "for dummies" title. 3. User's who don't understand VBA or SQL but want to be able to create reasonably advanced adhoc reports.
This title is to basic for the database administrator who would have to read 4 pages of babble to find the specific piece of information they need. There are no practice assignments for the beginner/intermediate report writer to do just that "practice". And when you do find a title that contains tutorials/assignments they are often to basic and lack real relevance in the business world. With the number of access, excel, crystal, etc. titles on the market you would think that there would be enough room to specifically appeal to the different types of software user's out their.

A good reference book
I develop financial reporting applications for various companies using VB and VBA.Recently I have completed a financial reporting system completely within Access 2000 making extensive uses of Access's report objects.

Although the Access report object does its job well, it lacks a lot of power features, i.e., limited grouping capabilities, formula in text boxes is limited to a simply expression unless you make a call to UFD, then you would loss your object encapsulation, etc, The Data Report object is VB6 is still some what of a joke, but let not open this can of worms.Thus, I have chosen Crystals reports for my developing needs.

I find George Peck's Complete Reference series very helpful.The book has 800 pages to teach me every nuance of Crystal.This book does not teach me anything about VB coding nor does it contain a reference to the object model within the RDC or any of the other object models in Crystal.I didn't buy this book to learn how to code.The author noted in page 659 specifically that the book is not meant to teach you Visual Basic.

Overall, this book gets me up to speed quickly and it's a good reference source for my future needs.Personally, I don't find the crystal help files very helpful.

Not much different than Crystal's own manual
I purchased this book as a reference. Fortunately, I had a separate training course for learning the Crystal application. And I now teach the product.

It's a good reference.I truly haven't had a question yet regarding basic or advanced procedures in the application that I couldn't find.But I would not recommend it for learning the application.It is dense.

I'm also disappointed that it is not very different from the CR 8.0 manual published by Crystal Decisions.The layout and procession of the book are virtually the same!It could have included more tutorials, too.

One thing that I would love for any CR reference/manual to include is a list and description of all the formulas in the system.To my knowledge, this does not exist anywhere, even in Crystal's own documentation.

PURCHASING RECOMMENDATION
If you need a solid reference and didn't purchase manuals with Crystal, this will work.If you need to learn the product, get something else. ... Read more