I did take the exam, and I just passed it, from the second attempt. My first attempt few months ago was close from passing the 65% requirement. All together, it took me 8 months to ace it, and I have no prior work experience with Crystal at all. So, I started from a scratch, studied every day for 4-6 hours, and fortunately I have Crystal installed at home, so I was able to practice as I was studying.
The cert exam was quite a surprise. There are 80 questions and 3 hours to answer it all. About good 50% of questions have more than one answer to check off, and mind it, they do not recognize partially correct answers, you either have to answer it all correctly or they won't give you partial score, unlike Microsoft's cert exams, for example. I found the exam hard, and what I learned today is that they change the questions rather frequently, meaning, they tweak them every so often, so answers may be in a different order, or, they will throw in another possible answer, so where you used to have 4 answers to choose from, now there are 5, etc.
I am not allowed to comment much further on the actual exam, as you have to sign off that nothing about the exam will be discussed, copied, etc. So, I'll leave it at this. I'll just add, that when you think you are ready to take the exam, don't get surprised when you see exam questions that ask almost impossible things.
I went through about 5-6,000 pages of different books, and I watched many training videos, which I found somewhat useful. There is nothing like actually creating reports, and that was the part of experience that I missed for my first exam.
Here are the books that I highly recommend:
- Crystal Reports Formulas Explained, by Jason Dove (excellent book);
- Crystal Reports Professional Results by George Peck;
- The Complete Reference Crystal Reports 2008, also by George Peck (excellent book);
- CRCP Crystal Reports Certified Professional Exam Guide by Annette Harper (an older version, but most of it still applies);
- Crystal Reports 2008 Official Guide, by Business Objects;
- Using Crystal Reports with SAP, by Mike Garrett;
- Crystal Reports Advanced Report Design Training Guide 9.0 (older version, but comes with lots of exercise);
- Crystal Reports 2008 Certification Questions and Answers, by Antonia Iroko (a decent one if you don't mind correcting her errors, and her Q & A's really have nothing to do with the questions in the actual exam);
- SAP's free Crystal Report SP1 User Guide in pdf, available to download from their website;
- TeachUComp training videos;
I believe this gives you enough material to pick from and go through. I must say that none of these books gave me a complete guidance/knowledge on how to pass the exam. Each one of them was helpful in its own way, but I can't single one book out and say "go through this one only, and you'll pass".
SAP does not make it easy to pass the exam, and mind it, you only have three attempts, and if you fail all three, then you have to wait until a new software version comes out, which takes years.
Fortunately, 2011 version just came out, but there are still no cert exams for it, only for 2008.
