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.
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.