Customer Reviews

REALbasic Cross-Platform Application Development

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

 

 

I have been a RealBasic programmer since version 3. So I buy anything about RealBasic. I have EVERY RealBasic book and as long as I can get a few good tips I am happy. ... which is why I hated this book.

First, the writing style is dead dry. You'll need a heaping glass of water and a fist full of No-Doze to stay awake.

Next, the book is totally disorganized. There are chapters, but once you enter the chapter, your off in a maze of disorganized prose.

This 600+ page tome has a bunch of NOT-useful stuff (like the ten page copyright notice at the end of the book). TEN pages!

You'll also learn about DOS and Windows 3.1 (which do not run RealBasic applications). Totally worthless.

There seems to be huge sections are copied from the internet. Charts, and a huge blob of XML code.

Some of the code expamples have flaws. In the first few chapters we are presented with a program to find the end of a line. This code does not work. But the bigger flaw is that it is not commented. Having written RealBasic code for years, I could understand what the code was trying to do. But a person new to RealBasic would benefit from comments in the code.

There is a need for a book that address Cross-Platform Application development with RealBasic. I write code on a Mac, but my traget customers are Windows users. So there are some things about cross development that a book could cover. However, this book only spends about 20 pages (out of 600+) talking about cross development.

After reading 200 pages, I asked myself, "do I really need to read the rest of this book?" So painfull.

The book is SO poorly organized that it can't even make it as a refrance book.

Yick ... back away from the order button.

really, really bad.

I don't see the point of this book. It starts by telling us about advanced OOP techniques - still assuming that the reader does not even know what OOP is. Then it explains file management methods, then XML. Then I stopped. The author idly wanders around RB's and operative systems features, picking random subjects. It is not a tutorial, not a reference guide, not a cookbook. There is no study path, no audience. Who should read it? and why?.
As a programmer, I was looking forward to an up-to-date, well structured book about RB - that I still consider a worthy option for desktop development. But Choate's book is a missed opportunity. Well, two stars for being brave and writing about a 'minor' language. I'll still try and get the most out of it, but RB deserves better.

There are not many REALbasic books out there and most of them our sadly out of date. So I had high hopes for this book. Alas, the author just rambled on with no apparent purpose or direction.

What a waste of paper. Bla bla bla ... this author rambles on and on without ever leading his reader to a helpful destination. I've never seen so much print covering so little substance. Each time I've turned to Choate's book for REALbasic guidance, I've been sadly disappointed. In fact, reading this book is little more than an excercise in futility. You're better off turning to the information supplied with the REALbasic programming language!

Choate should refund everyone's money and go back to his day job. I can't speak for Choate's other body of work, but in this case he's proven to be little more than an impresario peddling useless wares.

I found this book AMAZINGLY helpful! I'm a Java, C and C++ programmer moving over to RB because

it's cross platform and has a very easy GUI development system. I DON'T need another book to answer

what a byte is, how to write a loop or how to do Object Oriented Design.

This book does not coddle you. It assumes you know the basics of programming. It assumes you know

what you want to do. It will tell you how to do it. I have sticky tags all over my book, and it lives

at my right hand on my desk. It tells you all the strangenesses of RB on the different platforms, and how

to do the harder things. First read all the other books to learn the language. THEN GET THIS ONE!!!

You will be using it consistently.

I bought this book to learn REALBasic and especially the database stuff. This book is full of typos and non working code examples and there is no errata available in the hard to find website where it is to be found. Buy Beginning REALBasic by Jerry Lee Ford, Jr. instead.

Having bought almost all of the Realbasic books over the past 2 years, I have read them without comparing my impressions with those on Amazon's pages. So I found the negative comments on this book a surprise.

I think the O'reilly book by Matt Neuburg is the best book, overall, but I learned things in Mark's book that I hadn't found elsewhere.

The writing style is a bit casual so you can see quick diversions in focus away from the topic at hand, but it did not get in the way for me. It felt more like how you would talk to a friend, as opposed to a shotgun approach.

I ranked this book as my second favorite, followed by Jerry Lee Ford's book.

Choate's book is well-organized and timely in my opinion. Like Neuberg's Definitive Guide, it describes Rb's classes, controls, and built-in functions in detail, but in the context of today's capability. The chapter selections are good and there is a very readable 21-page index. It's very useful, for example, to have all of the Array functionality described in one place. The emphasis in the book is on the language functionality as opposed to duplicating the User's Guide describing the IDE. In addition to basic functionality, the book is especially strong with respect to text processing and encodings, the shell class and console application development, networking features, and codeless and coded database interfaces.

People should be aware that RealBasic is *not* backwards compatible--if you write a program in RealBasic, it won't even open in the version they put out 5 years from now. My library of hundreds of RealBasic programs (that were written between 2001 and 2005) is totally useless now because none of them will open in the 2008 and 2009 versions (I've talked to RealBasic staff about this and they claim that this phenomenon is totally normal...sure it is).

Here is the response I got from RealBasic when I asked why my programs won't even OPEN in the new version:

"Actually, 5 years is a long time to expect something to work without any changes to the project. I could understand expecting a text document to open after 5 years but development tools are much more complex because of OS changes and things like that. I have used a lot of programming tools (not just REALbasic) and have never seen one that did not require changes over the years."

Mark Choate's "REALbasic Cross-Platform Application Development" is one of the most comprehensive books about REALbasic currently available, not to say "the best book" about this (still exotic) language overall.

While beginners may be scared about the 656 pages, they definitively should leave their fears behind and give it a try. Although the book isn't the typical starter's tutorial, the author has taken any effort to explain all important aspects of object-oriented cross-platform programming in a way even a novice computer user with some background knowledge may understand it.

The contents cover all major topics of programming with REALbasic, so even professional software developers familiar with Visual Basic or any other programming language (Perl, Java, etc.) will find this book a good source of diving into the world of REALbasic.

Luckily the book isn't overloaded with screenshots and other space-filling things (like command references or charset code tables), so the 656 pages you get are 656 pages full of useful information, straightforward explanations and consistent programming examples.

There is just one little negative point to mention: The book is dated 2006, so the underlying REALbasic version is from 2005. That are over three years... a long time, seen the fact that REALbasic is updated several times a year. On the other side, all provided information are still valid and no fundamental changes have been applied to the language since this version was released.

All in all, "REALbasic Cross-Platform Application Development" can be recommended to everybody interested in this programming language, novice users as well as experienced developers.