Customer Reviews

The Bento Book: Beauty and Simplicity in Digital Organization

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Finally a book about the wonderful Bento database. My only complaint is that the text refers to illustrations that are too faint to read. I would certainly not mind paying a few dollars more for color illustrations or more clarity in the black and white print.

The font on this book is much too small to read and the book tries to cover both Bento 1.0 and 2,0 to cover users of both versions but makes it very diifficult to understand at times. Recommend major rewrite.

I've been trying to migrate from Projects in Entourage to Bento. While I miss some things in Projects, I love a lot of things in Bento. Hoping to power up my usage I bought this book. Chapter 11 on Designing a Projects Library with Related Notes was worth the price of purchase for me. Now, I can have a Notes library that is linked to every other library and enter multiple notes in one place by date. If the note is relevant to a particular project, I can show it in that project's window. GREAT for logging phone calls, ideas, etc. This is far superior to a separate text field for notes in each form.

I purchased this book for the very positive reviews it has regarding its usefulness in learning to use Bento, especially because some reviews extolled the book's coverage regarding many-to-many (M-T-M) relationships in Bento (Chapter 11). While I wasn't disappointed with its explanation and samples, it does not directly address the many-to-many relationships capability of the program except in the form of an example that happens to employ the feature. While all relational databases are capable of creating complex M-T-M relationships, I have yet to find one that simplifies creating M-T-M relationships as Bento does. (It would be nice if M-T-M relationships could be created as easily with FileMaker.) The problem is that the book does not explain this process very well; it just provides an example that happens to create an M-T-M relationship. I think a future edition of this book could treat M-T-M more directly and could better explain this powerful capability of Bento.

Bento is such a wonderful database program for the Apple Mac.

This book will assist you in utilizing it even better.

NOTE TO AUTHOR: The screenshots are a bit small to see sometimes. Please make them larger, in color, and more readable in the next edition.

Recommended to Bento users.

Although you do not need this book to operate Bento because the program is highly intuitive, it is great to have it in order to improve your performance and in discovering hidden features that can help you a lot.

Bento 3 for Mac is a personal relational database, but several users can log into there own account. The success of software like Bento, multi-user FileMaker or Oasis is the ease with which the developer can assimilate the product and make it work for him. The author did his best to be clear with partial success. The book starts off on a detailed general description of each of the following chapters. The window screen-dumps have letters that are too small. It takes too long to write how to customize the interface and link related displays (records). So you cannot do without hands-on experience and eventually (too late) you find out it was simple after all, but by that time you have absorbed many other features that perhaps were less relevant for you. The winning product is not the most powerful one, but the one that is easiest to study and implement. In case of doubt you are forced to try out your development in two or three products, which triples development time.
D. Vos

This is a good intro book to Bento.
It's only good (and not great) because it's not significantly different from the documentation on the Apple site.
I can only reason that Bento is not a really complex application and there is only so much to say.

Excellent database program, especially the way it integrates with the Macintosh operating system and core programs.