Customer Reviews

Beginning REALbasic: From Novice to Professional (Expert's Voice)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

I'm honestly surprised at the good reviews this book has gotten. I own literally hundreds of technical books (and have even helped write a couple), and believe I know good technical writing when I read it. Good technical writing makes the reader more enlightened, not more confused and frustrated. But after spending several trying hours with this book, the latter is just how I feel.

I don't doubt that Mr. Ford is a whiz programmer, and has a thorough understanding of the subject. But it's quite a different skill set to be able to convey that understanding in a methodical and enlightening way.

There's certainly a lot of information in this book, and much of it is helpful. But what drove me up the wall, among other things, is the subtle penchant the author seems to have for assuming that you already know what it is that he's referring to, even before he's actually bothered to explain it.

Thus, one of the first things I looked for was a brief Glossary of key terms and concepts. ... There wasn't any.

Failing that, I resorted to the Index -- which turns out to be quite hit-or-miss as well. A cursory search through the book reveals that certain key terms appear a full *80 pages* or more before their earliest reference in the index ("module" and "method" are but two examples).

And a handful of key terms don't even appear in the index at all! (Omissions I quickly chanced across included: class[!] ... declare ... intrinsic ... literal ... variant. And I'm sure if I continued to plow through this tome, my guess is I'd find a bunch more.)

Additionally, some passages describing key concepts scream out for a well-placed diagram or two. Instead, they're conveyed through languorous prose. (Example: Classes/Subclass/Super Class, on pages 209 & 211.)

There's also circumlocution: for example, on p.117, Mr. Ford goes on about how "difficult" it is to preview how menus will look under different OS's ... and then in the very next paragraph, demonstrates how easy it is!

But the last straw, and what spoke volumes to me, was a number of minor typos scattered throughout the text. Clearly, if I could find a bunch of these in just the first hour or two of reading, then clearly there wasn't a decent book editor/proofreader assigned to the case. (Someone worth their salt could also have helped spruce up organization of the content, and made it more accessible in general, with respect to much of the above.)

In spite of this book being billed as for "Beginners" and "Novices" -- I frequently got the impression that it's really targeted for *experienced* programmers (who just happen to be transitioning from some other language, like Visual Basic).

Now, don't get me wrong: I'm a very technically-savvy guy. And I really don't have an axe to grind. I just didn't know RealBasic ... which is why I bought this book! It's too bad there's such a dearth of current material on this intriguing cross-platform development environment, and thus, more choices of good books on the subject.

Nevertheless, based on all the foregoing, you may consider looking elsewhere (even at older books, by more established authors), if you're looking for a genuinely well-written introduction to the topic. As soon as I finish posting this review, I'm going to do the same.

[Addendum, 7/8/07]:

Yesterday, I just happened to run across the author's latest book, "AppleScript Studio Programming for the Absolute Beginner". Surprisingly, it's far better and seems to address many of the weaknesses from this book, listed above. But unfortunately, it's not about RealBasic! The notable difference in style, though, is enough to confirm my hunch that what "Beginning REALbasic" could have used was more rigorous editing and insightful layout, by someone knowledgeable about presenting technical material. Hopefully, someone will catch onto this for a future edition ... or perhaps some other author will give the subject a go. In the meantime, I'm going to return this book, and pick up the Neuberg and Tejkowski ones instead.

Jerry Lee Ford's Realbasic book does an excellent job taking the beginner from knowing nothing to knowing quite a lot. Each chapter is well written and ends with an actual programming project which puts the chapter material into practice. If you don't just use the examples on the CD but actually do the project yourself, you will have created 12 programs by the end of the book. I'm not sure why a previous reviewer thought Mr. Ford was not a teacher as the style is very good and the pace is not too fast. This isn't a For Dummies book, but if you are ready to study it (that is, not just skim a chapter without working the examples), you should do well. And why the previous reviewer criticizes Mr. Ford for not commenting the code when practically every line of every program is commented is beyond a mystery. The book has a few typos, especially in later chapters, but those are very largely in the text itself and not in the programs, or are easy to spot (one program button has ActionButton.Captain instead of ActionButton.Caption, for example, but as buttons have captions (the words written on them to say what they do) and not captains, it's pretty easy to spot this typo, especially by chapter 10!). I recommend this book over Mr. Swaine's book (Realbasic: Visual Quickstart Guide) as this book is much more complete and the programs actually work! I also think it is a better book for beginners than Mr. Choate's book (Realbasic Crossplatform Application Development), which I also actually like, but which is not ideally suited for those starting out. That book would be better used as an up-to-date reference book, much like the now dated but still useful Realbasic: The Definitive Guide by Matt Neuburg. All in all, I think Mr. Ford's book is the place to start for those getting into programming with Realbasic and I have profited greatly from his book.

My first introduction to Jerry Lee Ford, Jr.'s work was an introduction to VBScript and WSH which was just plain awful. Thus I was a bit leery of ordering another book by him.

I'm pleased to report that Ford has done an excellent job of providing a solid introduction to REALbasic. It is indeed a basic introduction and may be too insubstantial for very experienced programmers. For beginners through intermediate, though, I think it's a fine piece of work and easier to work with than REALbasic's own tutorial manual.

Ford provides an overview of REALbasic first and contrasts it with VisualBasic. By page 58, he has the reader constructing a simple, but impressive, REALbasic application that does a nice job of demonstrating how easy it is to program REALbasic for simple tasks and how versatile it can be. He then moves through creating menu structures in REALbasic and other basic programming concepts.

Chapter 8 is a pretty good basic introduction to Object-Oriented Programming. Chapters 9 and 10 introduce text file and data processing. Chapter 11 covers graphics and audio and Chapter 12 covers debugging. Example programs are provided for each chapter. None of them are overly complex, but all do teach you the basic features of REALbasic.

All in all, it's well done for the new to intermediate level programmer who is coming to REALbasic.

Jerry

REALbasic is a strongly-typed object-oriented form of the BASIC programming language. It allows you to create full-featured applications that support all of the features of the computer that your application runs on. Thus you end up with a single-file application that does not require a run-time engine, DLL, plug-in, etc. so that your application is easily deployed and installed and stands alone on either a Mac, a Windows machine, or a Linux-based computer. Best of all, the language is easy to learn, and this is one of the best books out there for introducing yourself to it.

The author has a very accessible style that truly does take you from the very beginnings of working with REALbasic to teaching you some of what you need to know to build professional applications. He usually starts each chapter telling you why this particular topic is important, and then uses screen shots of the Realbasic IDE to show you how to add functionality to your applications. Instructions are usually given in numbered steps along with these IDE screenshots. Tip boxes are added throughout the book where appropriate, and steps and concerns specific to a particular OS, be it Linux or Mac OS X or Windows, are addressed when applicable. The author usually concludes each chapter with a small application for you to design that tests the knowledge you should have gained, along with a summary. I found it very easy to pick up this language using this book. No previous experience with Visual Basic is assumed, though if the author thinks that a particular REALbasic concept might be particularly confusing for Visual Basic programmers, he adds a note or tip to make sure they don't get started down the wrong path. Highly recommended. The following is the table of contents:

PART 1 - INTRODUCING REALBASIC

1. An Introduction to REALBasic

2. Navigating the REALbasic IDE

PART 2 - LEARNING HOW TO PROGRAM WITH REALBASIC

3. Creating an Application's User Interface

4. Working with REALbasic Menus

5. Storing and Retrieving Application Data

6. Making Decisions with Conditional Logic

7. Iterative Processing

8. Object-Oriented Programming

PART 3 - ADVANCED TOPICS

9. Processing Text Files

10. Working with Databases

11. Working with Graphics and Audio

12. Debugging REALbasic Applications

PART 4 - APPENDIXES

Appendix A - Migrating Visual Basic Projects to REALbasic

Appendix B - What's on the CD-ROM

Appendix C - What's Next

This book gives a good overview of Realbasic but is not suitable to study RealBasic programming nor is it a useful reference book because it does not treat any subject in depth. I was looking for something like an updated version of Matt Neuburg's book "Realbasic, The Definite Guide" but Neuburg's book, even though dated, still answers many more questions for me than Jerry Ford's book. The title is misleading: A novice cannot get enough information and for a professional the book is not sufficiently advanced and detailed (I myself am somewhere in between).

This is one of the worst, overpriced books ever written for a programming language I have read so far. Someone who bought this book doing first steps in software development may become disappointed very quickly.

1. The scope and quality of this book is far below of the documentation that ships with REALbasic, which is outstanding in my mind. So if you print the included tutorials and guides, you just have to pay for the paper to get an in-depth, up to date learning experience, the book cannot provide.

2. It appears to me that the author's intention was to just write a thick book - the first chapters are boring, even to absolute novices:

Each and every aspect of the GUI is explained in a way that also a person never worked on a computer can understand... but this is surely not the target group of such a book. There are so many screenshots not really required, just to fill space.

3. Unfortunately after explaining the GUI like an endless novel, the author forgot his original intention to write a beginners' book and starts by diving into REALbasic too quickly and too deep.

If the willing learner became bored during the first chapters, it is now nearly impossible to follow without using REALbasic's internal documentation to understand certain topics (in my mind, chapter 9 can be considered as the worst one - so if you managed this, you can call yourself a professional programmer for sure :-).

The author often introduces programming examples with the phrase "for now, key in these statements just as shown...". Especially in the first chapters, people simply type in commands without knowing what they do exactly - this is nothing than wasted time.

4. Not less of the source codes shown and explained in this book contain logical errors making it very hard for a novice programmer to understand them. It seems that the author isn't a professional programmer of his own.

All in all "Beginning REALbasic. From Novice to Professional" cannot be recommended at all. The documentation shipped with REALbasic for free is much, much better. I wished I hadn't bought it...

For me, this book is a good review. I've done a lot of programming, so it's nice to get some specific tips on REALbasic to remind me how it works as opposed to other languages. It is written from an IT guy's viewpoint, so it is pretty thorough. It doesn't quite go as advanced as I need, and it's so thoroughly multi-OS that I have to dig out info about Mac OS X, which is all I'm really interested in.

Finally, there is an up-to-date book on REALbasic worth reading. The author's writing style is easy follow and straightforward. He moves well from basic concepts to more advanced programming technigues. All in all, this is the REAlbasic book I have been waiting for. I'd give it more than 5 stars but amazon won't let me.

I'm giving it five starts, though I was heading toward four. The reason I was heading for four is that it hasn't been updated and is fairly out of date. The reason I'm sticking to five is that it's not the books fault and the publishers haven't updated it.

Me: I did some BASIC programing back in the dark ages (really - my first Basic learning was on a mainframe because there weren't any PC's). I played with others over the years Forth, Pascal, QB, even played a bit with C. QB was handy and I was able to make some quick and dirty utilities. Really nothing you can't do in Apple Script right now. Oh I have done a bunch of FileMaker Db's and have used a fair amount of Apple script in some of those.

But When I decided to try out Real Basic I was a bit stumped having never done OOP and having not really programed (in a language) since the early 90's. So I went looking for tutorials and info I was fairly disappointed on what is in print. There is a TON from the community on line but not a structured walk through of RB. So I finally got a few books to try and get over the hump. This book really helps hold your hand through getting oriented.

The cons are it's for a much earlier version of RB so some stuff just isn't correct anymore. It's not too bad and the basics are still pretty much the same, as far as I have gotten. So it's not as frustrating as some have claimed.

It's not terribly deep but I was looking for something to wedge my brain into the RB way of thinking and this has been very good at that.

Please, if you're looking to learn REALbasic / REAL Studio, leave this book on the shelf.

Sorry to start with such a strong negative warning. I wasn't expecting much based on other reviews, but this is the WORST eBook presentation of an already poorly edited book that I've been unfortunate enough to purchase. Errors, bad layout formatting, no table of contents or index, simply wrong statements in the text, this couldn't get any worse.

I went to the Apress website to see if there were updates, edits, or a new printing of this mess and the Apress site refuses to admit this book exists.

Even if I concede the differences between the 2006 version of REALbasic versus the current 2010 release, the simple fact that there are many wrong statements and assumptions in the text make this work worse than bad because it provides misleading, confusing, and even completely wrong information for users about REALbasic and the platforms it supports.

It's too bad that there aren't other, more current books on REALbasic / REAL Studio, but since it's obviously an orphan from Apress' point of view, this one needs to be removed from the Amazon (and other) stores.