Customer Reviews

Filemaker Pro 3.0: A Developer's Guide

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This book is dreadful! Void of any helpful information. Examples are not well explained and are difficut to dissect. A total waste a paper and ink. Poorly arranged and bolstered with useless information, DON"T WASTE YOUR MONEY ! It's over rated at one star!

This book is divided into two general sections, the first of which explains relational database theory, and the second of which explores the features of FileMaker Pro. The theory as Mr. Kennedy explains it is pointlessly abstract and totally useless as a learning tool. The exposition of FileMaker's features that follows this is less complete than FileMaker's own Help menu, and bears virtually no relation to the theoretical section. Don't waste your money.

Supposedly a "Developers" guide to Filemaker Pro 3 , which implies it's for more advanced users, the book is a mere 290 pages (sans index) or 274 if you discount the Glossary. Of this, Part One is 65 pages of the most simplistic introduction to database design without ANY reference to the product. While the Win and Mac versions of Filemaker are pretty much identical, the book is still "Mac centric" with a 10 page chapter concerning Win 95 which is also simplistic in the extreme. Subtract Chapters on OLE and Networking which are also pathetic in content (Example: "FileMaker for Win 95 does not support Applescript"...Duh!), large typefaces, lots of whitespace and a Review of each chapter which is pure repetition for the sake of padding, since the book is not a "teaching text" in any sense and what you have is a pamphlet which barely scratches the surface of the subject. There are virtually NO decent examples included and, for example, the single most important and complex new feature in the product, namely Portals, gets mentioned for a total of ONE page. In short, if you are actually looking for a Developers Guide to Filemaker Pro 3 you will feel completely cheated, SAVE YOUR MONEY..Oh and Addison-Wesley, who can usually be relied upon for good to excellent technical publications in this field should be ASHAMED in this case.

I found the book to be vague and missing many critical points of information. It has become the last book I turn to in my collection when I am researching a solution to a FileMaker design or development. I cannot recommend the purchase of this book