Customer Reviews

Building Visual Foxpro 5 Applications

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

This is the worst book on programming that I have bought. Mr.Barrie Sosinsky didn't write the book in a proper way where the readers can learn the magic power of Visual Foxpro.

This is the best book I've found yet on VFP5 since it covers full application development but actually covers each of the topics in detail. My main gripe with most books is that they cover in detail a few areas and then start jumping ahead to where most cannot follow. How to make a simple but complete logon and password form. Eg. multiuser concerns chapter is 60 pages long covering details, not just how many buffering options exist. Details on views, how to test multiuser etc. The classes chapter covers eg. the four ways to use classes from your class library on your form. An included CD has MailMan a FoxPro mail generation & tracking system, PinterFoxPro letter, & demo software for xCase

I have tried to use this an introduction to VFP 5.0 on three occassions. This last time I HURLED it across the room at the wall! This is no exaggeration. The cover implies it will take the reader through a tutorial of how to build a VFP 5 program. However, you start the 'project' on about page 45 and Barrie then leaves the subject open and moves through to at least page 140 without ever mentioning the 'project' again. On page 67 he states 'Right click the database designer'...... there IS no database designer on screen nor in the menus and he has not mentioned it up until now! On page 75 he states 'If you don't see the relationship type you want, go back into the tables involved and re-define the index(es)'. At no point does he suggest how to change them or what to change them to. There are 3 types of indexes giving arange of 9 possibilities with no assistance from Barrie at all.

Thanks Barrie for wasting my time and money! (You might guess that I do not like this book!!!!)

Sometimes too many details, sometimes not enough, but overall a good balance. And the methodology of walking all the way through one project works.

I bought the book because it was advertised as being intermediate to advanced level. I do not understand this since it is more like an end-user book. It certainly is not for one wanting to develope software that produces printed reports which was the reason I thought I wanted it. END

There are brief instructions at the back of the book on how install the CD data files. After simply copying the folders from the CD to the hard drive, as instructed, and then trying to open the project and rebuild it, as instructed, one finds that all of the files are read-only. It seems that Barrie wants people to by his book, but does not want them to be able to access the data on the CD, rendering the data files and therefore the book, useless.

I'd have to say this book is disappointing
to an extent. I'm a beginner to VFP and thought
this book would help me gain a better
understanding of how VFP works. It has in
that it does a great job of explaining the
different VFP commands in the early chapters.
However, while Sosinsky provides step-by-step
information for creating different
tables, showing off VFP commands etc, he doesn't have
any data to put into the tables so the tutorials
can be rather confusing. It would
have been better if he had included
sample data to connect the tutorials together.

Barry, you make no mention of how to access the features on the CD-Rom. I get read-only messages whenever I try and look at any of the underlying forms or programs. Unfortunately, I was only trying to look at the CD because I wasn't getting much out of the book to begin with.

I bought this book because the Developer Studio CD version of VFP includes no manual. The book claims to provide step-by-step instructions on how to build VFP apps. I think not. There's some passably interesting information on consulting and general issues, but this is a horrible book to attempt to learn VFP programming from.

This is approximately an intermediate book with quite a bit of elementary material on database development that is not specific to FoxPro. I like that it gives the reader a broad overview of the development process, but it does not give enough detail to "construct a marketable database" as the back cover touts. As an application programer moving from FoxPro 2.x to VFP, I had many questions that went unanswered. However, I found a number of the missing answers in the VFP 5.0 documentation. I also liked that the book used the framework application included with VFP 5.0 for illustration, instead of an entirely different framework. Because the book's guidelines are consistent with Microsoft's approach, the VFP 5.0 wizards are far more useable. On the other hand, this book's discussion of VFP's OOP implementation is way too choppy and shallow to allow someone new to VFP to really use OOP effectively.